On May 7th and May 9th, with the help of Blue Ocean Society volunteers, I led beach cleanups for Liberty Mutual’s annual Serve with Liberty employee campaign. Approximately 120 Liberty Mutual volunteers joined us at each cleanup, starting with Hampton Beach on Tuesday and ending with Foss Beach on Thursday. Despite unusually cold May weather and strong winds, the volunteers put in incredible effort to remove 192 pounds of debris from Hampton Beach and 514 pounds of debris from Foss Beach.
Recent rainstorms throughout the month of April have made our beach cleanups much colder and wetter than usual this spring, but our volunteers are happy to lead groups in making our beaches cleaner and safer, rain or shine. Another effect of the heavy rain has been unpredictable amounts of debris along the tideline: some storms seem to push more trash out onto to the sand, tangled in seaweed, while others seem to wipe the beach clean of debris.
Serve with Liberty volunteers clean Hampton Beach.
At Hampton Beach, it seemed as though the latter was true last Tuesday, and we were able to focus our efforts on the portion of the beach past the wrack line, where the sand is unaffected by the tide. We also deployed a sub-group to South Beach, the section of the beach that is not raked by the town, to remove debris that quite possibly has been present since fall.
At Foss Beach, we found a large amount of rope and rope scraps tangled up in fresh seaweed that had been washed up in recent storms and tides. More rope was found lodged between the boulders that line the edge of the beach, and within the tidepools that were exposed while we cleaned. The rope was wet and very heavy, contributing the bulk of the weight to the massive 514-pound cleanup total.
A highlight of both cleanups was an abnormally large number of Hooksett disks found by the groups: 15 were found at Hampton Beach, and two were found at Foss Beach. Hooksett disks are plastic wastewater treatment disks, about 2.5 inches in diameter, that were accidentally spilled into the Merrimack River in 2011 from Hooksett, NH.
If you find a Hooksett disk at the beach this summer, you can contribute to our ongoing research project studying the movement of these disks by reporting it at www.reportdisks.org.
Hooksett disks found at Hampton Beach on May 7th.
We sincerely appreciate the time and energy given to cleaning our beaches by each and every group. Thank you to all who have volunteered with us in the past, and we look forward to the many cleanups with new groups we will lead this summer! If you would like to arrange a cleanup for your group, please submit an interest form here.
Huge thank you to the volunteers of Liberty Mutual in making these cleanups a success!
