Marsh Creek Cleanup September 2006

by B. Margesson, with K. D. Silva
Photos by Russell Byrne

For the past five years Barry & Ken have helped promote The Marsh Creek Clean-up, which has removed tons of trash from the creek and taught residents lessons about conservation and preservation

Marsh Creek provides a wonderful habitat for living creatures. If you walk quietly you can see muskrats working along the banks and taking crawdads. If lucky you can see a river otter. You might see a blue heron flapping lazily along the streambed.

For all the stresses we put on it, Marsh Creek remains pretty resilient. In spite of our deforestation, v-ditching, and channelizing for flood control, life keeps crowding back into the creek. Fish and bird populations seem to be increasing. The creek ecosystem appears to be thriving in spite of the interference of the increasingly more urbanized environment of the communities through which if flows.

Even though the stream is an amazing virile system, it is destructible! We human beings have demonstrated that we can kill anything if we try hard enough.

A tub of solvent poured down a storm drain can wipe out populations of fish in a single afternoon. Last year Marsh Creek experienced a big fish kill. The bodies of dead bluegills and frogs lay side-by-side in the waters and on the banks. It was a sad spectacle! Something had passed quickly through the waters of the stream and killed hundreds of denizens. The substance was gone before the researchers arrived on the scene. It might have been anything. The event served as a stark reminder of how fragile Marsh Creek is and how important it is that we work together to preserve this wonderful resource.

Various agencies are responsible for the health of the Marsh Creek waterway including Contra Costa County Flood Control, the City of Brentwood, and East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), which has an easement on the trails themselves and an operation agreement with us at Brentwood Parks and Recreation.

The Marsh Creek Trail, which runs through the area, is one of EBRPD’s major regional trails. EBRPD helps us with litter patrol and graffiti; we do most of the vegetation management. Our combined resources are insufficient to perform the “deep cleaning” that is needed on an annual basis. Just as a homeowner will perform spring-cleaning once a year, we give a good clean out of Marsh Creek in the fall.

Joining Together to Make a Difference
September 16 will mark the tenth anniversary of the ICC (International Coastal Cleanup). On that day an innumerable multitude of people from around the world will be joining together to clean up some water resource in their area. It will be a planet-sized illustration of the principle “Think globally; act locally.”

Some of us in Brentwood will join that dedicated host as we celebrate the fifth year of the Marsh Creek Clean-up. The September date represents good timing for us since it permits us to gather debris before winter rains can wash it into the Delta.

Ken De Silva and I have been helping put the event together since its inception. In fact, Brentwood is the third community in which Ken initiated major clean-up efforts in coordination with the ICC. On September 16 volunteers in Antioch and Pleasanton will be picking trash out of various creeks and flood channels in continuation of programs that he started.

The Marsh Creek Clean-up Committee is composed of city employees from the Brentwood Parks & Rec, joined by representatives from public schools’ environmental clubs, the CCCRCD (Contra Costa County Resource Conservation District), local scouting groups, and especially by representatives from the Friends of Marsh Creek.

On September 16 volunteers will show up at Creekside Park from all over the city. Some are individual attendees but many are coming with some sponsoring group such as church groups, community service organizations, businesses, scout troops including boy scouts, girl scouts, and cub scouts.

The Marsh Creek Clean-up is a joy-filled event, with a lot of smiling and happy people working together to perform a needed community service. The event promotes a great sense of belonging in the hearts of the volunteers, as they laugh and get their hands dirty and feet wet, together with their neighbors or new friends.

The most obvious and gratifying outcome from the event is the amazing pile of debris that the volunteers are able to retrieve from the creek during only two hours of working. Volunteers joining in the effort for the first time are always surprised by how much garbage we end up with. Individuals pick up one or two seemingly insignificant bags of garbage but when put together the combined amount creates an astonishing tower of trash.

The assortment of rubbish we pull out of the creek includes large items such as tires, shopping carts, couches, and major appliances such as water heaters. These things are difficult to pull out and are large enough to do real damage such as obstructing water flow and diverting the stream so that it causes bank erosion.

Smaller examples of the waste that we collect include cups, cigarettes, pieces of Styrofoam, plastic bags…. The list goes on and on until it finally provides a fairly complete inventory of the physical elements that make up our modern lives.

That pile of garbage that we collect is only the most visible outcome of our labors. I believe that an even more important result lies in the invisible learning that the clean-up day promotes in the hearts and minds of the participants. We’re especially targeting the youth. We’re trying to get them to realize that a candy wrapper carelessly tossed into a gutter eventually gets washed into a storm drain, then into the creek, and eventually into the Delta. They come to realize that the creek is part of a complicated and fragile interconnected system that stretches from the sides of Mount Diablo down to the Delta waters.

The most effective part of the learning that goes on that day, perhaps, comes from the very act of cleaning up. Participants get down in the creek itself and gain a first-hand view of how beautiful this resource is on one hand, and how jarring and marring the effects of pollution are on the other. Most of them come away with a conviction that Marsh Creek deserves to be conserved and treated with respect.

Teaching to Make a Difference
A lot of collateral learning goes on in the many displays and exhibits that a number of organizations set up during the clean-up day.

Our Brentwood Parks & Rec Department, for example, sets up educational games. A Salmon Run Game teaches about the salmon lifecycle. The children actually follow a path from one part of the lifecycle to another. A sprinkler on the course, for example, represents rapids.

The CCCRCD, under Mary Grimm’s energetic leadership, always plays a major role on clean-up day. One of the most popular exhibits is their elaborate model that demonstrates the dynamics of the Mount Diablo watershed. Children can spray “pollution” onto the model in the form of water with black dye and note how the pollution makes its way from any part of the model to wind up, finally, in the Delta waters.

Also on display is CCCRCD’s third grade book project. Under Mary’s direction, public school children went down to the creek and observed the animals and plants growing there. Then they conducted research so they could draw illustrations of the things they had seen, together with write-ups of each particular plant or animal. The project greatly raised the environmental consciousness of the children who participated, as well as the people who buy and read the book. Third graders have been heard to announce, with some pride, “I’m a published author and illustrator!” and can open the book to whatever page that they did to prove their claim.

School-based environmental clubs show up with exhibits. The most important of these, perhaps, is Freedom High School’s science class under the direction of Tom Lindemuth. Tom is a member of the “hands on” school of environmental learning. For years he has been taking successive classes of eager learners down into the creek bed to observe the plants and animals growing there. Local fishermen knew that salmon were breeding in the creek but the public in general, and the environmental watchdog and research groups, in particular, never suspected their existence until the day Tom reported finding a dead salmon.

Every year Tom’s classes analyze Marsh Creek’s water and provide substantial research data over time. Their water purity charts enable us to measure the effects of changes we make to the channel. We can get real answers to questions needed for the continuous improvement we aim for. If a development, for example, makes a new channel, we can see what changes might take place in water quality.

The Audubon Society attends the clean-up day with posters and literature about their work in support bird habitats. Oakley’s Delta Science Center has displays. EBRPD is also there with displays and learning materials. The Liberty Environmental Club, led by Julie Hubbard, is there as are representatives from Walnut Creek’s Lindsey Wildlife Museum, the Shell Ridge Open Space, and others. Bob Wiseacre, from the Shell Ridge group, brings materials so volunteers can build their own birdhouses and bat habitats on site.

Doing What we Can
I started working on creek clean-up activities before our Marsh Creek Clean-up got started. I’m a booster of Marsh Creek Watershed preservation activities and try to help manage the Marsh Creek Clean-up effort.

The Marsh Creek clean-up raises awareness of the need for safeguarding our environment. It can renew people’s commitment to meet head-on the moral challenge facing us to do what we can to preserve our world intact for our own wellbeing and as a trust to hold in faith for the generations that will inherit it when we are gone.

Someone once wrote about the event:

The trash structure served as a monument of shame to the thoughtless people who move among us like some race of mutant aliens who imagine that the lovely Marsh Creek area exists to serve as a dump for the rubbish that they are either too lazy or too stupid to discard in an appropriate manner.

But the most important theme for us all as we stood before the Tower of Trash that day was the realization that we had joined together to cleanse our Marsh Creek of this immense pile of garbage that had been littering and polluting our lovely stream only a few hours before.

And that felt really good! It feels good to all of us, actually.

To get more information about the clean-up call 925-516-5444, email lstadlbauer@ci.brentwood.ca.us, or check out www.ci.brentwood.ca.us/department/parks/parksrec.cfm