GILROY—Responding to the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce’s call for a swift cleanup of Miller Slough, more than 40 volunteers made quick work of removing mounds of trash from the waterway that runs through central Gilroy.
High school students brushed shoulders with Gilroy firefighters as river rats with a local environmental group and others hauled more than 40-cubic-yards of garbage from the waterway in just four hours Saturday morning.
Wearing gloves and boots, they came with the goal of cleaning up an area of town that accumulated large amounts of debris after the winter rains.
“There’s a proverb that says, ‘many hands make light work,’ and that proved to be true Saturday,” said Gilroy Chamber CEO Mark Turner, who partnered in the project with Herman Garcia, founder of the Gilroy-based conservations group, CHEER.
“We were able to achieve our goal much more quickly than we anticipated,” Turner said,
Recology, the trash hauling and recycling firm, donated two 20-cubic-yard dumpsters, which filled quickly. Among debris pulled from the creek bed beneath bridges and roadways was food, human waste, a used hypodermic needle and other unsanitary items.
“This was awesome,” Garcia said as a smile beamed across his face near the completion of the cleanup effort—despite having pulled a muscle early in the day.
Personnel belongings such as a stack of elementary school homework, clothing, prescription medications and a guitar case made it obvious that a growing homeless population calls the waterway home.
One volunteer, a division chief with the Gilroy Fire Department, observed that the city’s bridges and overpasses have become the go-to location for the homeless when emergency shelters fill up.
“These are the places they hang and this is where they get whatever privacy they can,” said Colin Martin, as he pulled debris from the footbridge at IOOF Avenue not far from Rebekah Children’s Services.
Graffiti, some of it obscene and anti-law enforcement, covered the underbelly of the footbridge. “We have the only armory in the county that is open right now and that tends to draw people down here,” he said.
In the weeks prior to Saturday’s cleanup, Gilroy police informed the homeless along Miller Slough they would need to move and advised them to keep important belongings with them.
Garcia said he distributed garbage bags to the homeless separately and let them know his intention is to simply keep the waterways clean for everyone.
“You’ve got to have tolerance, compassion and love in your heart when you’re dealing with these folks,” he added. “I tried to get them prepared to start the exodus out of the waterways and that doesn’t mean going from one section of creek to another; it means start looking for an alternative location outside of the waterways because that impacts everybody’s water quality.”
Every bit of debris drudged from the waterway could have been damaging if not removed, according to Garcia. Miller Slough connects to Llagas Creek, which flows to the Pajaro River and ultimately the Pacific Ocean.
“That’s why it’s important to get all the toxins and pollutants out, because all this has an impact on the watershed ecosystems and eventually all the wildlife in the protected Monterey Bay sanctuary,” Garcia said.
Styrofoam products, for example, are deadly to a wide range of marine life because the synthetic material breaks apart in water. As the pieces of Styrofoam float atop the water, giving the appearance of food, marine life ingests the substance but cannot digest it and it ultimately causes the animal’s death, Garcia explained.
While some high school students initially signed up to complete required community service hours, one student at the Dr. TJ Owens Gilroy Early College Academy said he was grateful to have participated.
“This is obviously a huge problem and I’m glad I came out,” said Anooj Desai as he wrangled cardboard boxes from beneath the footbridge at IOOF Avenue.
“The effort of our volunteers to clean up the creek is citizen activism at its best,” Turner said.
In a separate effort next month, the City of Gilroy is seeking hundreds of volunteers for an annual cleanup of Uvas Creek beginning at Christmas Hill Park, scheduled to take place at 9 a.m. April 25.
