Posted on 11/10/2023 6:33:48 AM PST by Red Badger
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Lake Mead’s blue waters and striking landscapes are a desert jewel in one of the most visited national recreation areas in the United States and it shows. Everywhere you look, you will find litter. So far this year, volunteers have removed 27,000 pounds of trash on and around the lake.
Trash found at Lake Mead. (KLAS) Ken Kotora is one of those volunteers and he has been cruising this lake for more than 30 years. He calls Lake Mead the best lake in the world. Sadly, others don’t treat it that way.
“It’s disgusting. People don’t care and they just leave their trash and it’s a bad thing,” he said.
Kotora volunteers his time driving volunteers around the lake to help pick up trash. He captains “The Oz” boat which stands for Operation Zero, one of the lake’s many efforts to help stop litter. He’s been helping since he retired from the City of Las Vegas in 2016.
National Park Ranger Anna Blalock and volunteer Ken Kotora examine trash collected from a Lake Mead beach. (KLAS) Park Ranger Anna Blalock helps run the volunteer program at Lake Mead. She coordinates groups of four to six people to pick up trash at the lake. Each visit results in nearly 500 pounds of garbage collected.
“We bring volunteers out to one of these coves to pick up trash for an hour or so and as a way to say thank you, we take them to see the Hoover Dam,” she said.
Volunteers come out in the spring and fall but in recent years the number of volunteers has dwindled from 4,000 a year prior to the pandemic to around 1,000 a year now.
Less volunteers means more garbage on the lake which can pose a danger to animals and humans.
PICTURE GALLERY AT LINK............
“Broken glass is a really big risk to wildlife and humans. We don’t want folks or wildlife stepping on broken glass. We also have fishing lines so that can get tangled up in the ducks and vegetation,” Blalock said.
Some of the strangest things they have found include an old Nokia phone and lots of boat cushions and boat seats. But some things they can’t remove.
“Anything that is over 50 years old we cannot throw away. So, a Coors can someone threw the side of their boat in the ’70s, unfortunately, we are not able to remove and we see a lot of that.”
Blalock said the reason is because those items are considered historical and are on public land which is protected by law. As the water level has decreased in recent years, some previously sunken boats have resurfaced. Currently, there is no plan to remove them.
Katora tells 8 News Now he plans to help clean up his beloved lake as long as he can.
“I sure love to see the lake getting cleaned up, especially around the beach areas. I also enjoy the enthusiasm the volunteers bring. They are really excited about it,” he said.
Volunteers make up just a small part of the team that helps remove trash but they have a big impact. Other efforts by the park include paying crews which costs the park $800,000 a year.
If you are interested in volunteering to pick up litter at Lake Mead, there are a few different opportunities. There are also other volunteer opportunities. You can find them all at this link.
When you don’t care about your country to control who you let in, why should anyone else care?
What do you think would happen to your house, loved ones, and contents, if you took your front door off?
True.
People are such slobs. It’s disgusting.
We live in rural NH and the amount of garbage we have found on our property that the original owners, and we think others, have dumped on this property is absolutely disgusting. And I know we’re not alone. We clean it up as we find it, but still, it is very frustrating.
Long ago we looked at a house in the country where the owners never went to the dump. They just put their bags of trach out on the property behind the house. There was a huge pile of trash bags left that that IF we bough the property, we’d either have to leave there or deal with and neither was an option for us. It was otherwise a decent piece of property but that was the reason we did NOT buy it.
How about you have some police hanging around and fine all these litterbugs for a while? A little deterrent goes a long way.
Feeding Stray cats or whos trapping them isnt enough to keep the board busy right now. they need another war for some reason.
45% of GDP spent on Government, and still volunteers are the ones who must pick up trash around one of the Southwest’s most important sources of water?
“$800,000 / year”
This is the problem with lib bureaucrats: They can’t envision - let alone support - a system that doesn’t involve government reaction to a problem they help create.
You take that $800k, offer it up as bounty in $5k chunks for each offending boat, pass a civil forfeiture/impoundment local/state law and let the citizenry start turning in videos of boaters littering.
In a matter of weeks, the problem will resolve itself AND no longer be a burden to taxpayers.
But it will never happen.
Precisely. Anyone who is upset about litter and trash should visit a few third world countries that are already where the US is heading.
Look like the Rio Grande river after the latest wave of illegals crossed.... any illegals crossing the lake?
The boaters around middle Tennessee are terrible about allowing trash in the lakes. Several years ago, my family and I became so disgusted with the amount of trash on the banks that we spontaneously started picking it up. We cleaned an area probably less than a quarter acre in size and got 8 full trash bags.
We were always taught that if you pack it in, you pack it out. But I’m old and grew up when people believed in right and wrong.
2 miles from my house there is a very popular mountain that garners thousands of people every year to either play in the snow or the California Poppies when in bloom. These assholes leave 3 Garbage Trucks full of trash every damned weekend when they show up. I will let you guess on the racial makeup of these filthy scum.
Back in the day, many if not most kids learned to take care of the environment through Scouting—i.e. Don’t litter natural areas. If you have trash, pack it out when you go.
Never forget that the LGBTs killed scouting.
“Anything that is over 50 years old we cannot throw away. So, a Coors can someone threw the side of their boat in the ’70s, unfortunately, we are not able to remove and we see a lot of that.”
Blalock said the reason is because those items are considered historical
Our neighbors who live just down the road often burn their trash and it stinks.
Normal to them.
Not to mention all the human bones that have been found as the lake retreats...
From The Guardian:
“Sixth set of human remains found in vanishing Lake Mead”
I would tend to agree - I hike with my dogs in and around the once-pristine canyons of Southern California - there are a few creeks that run through them - the amount of trash left after a weekend is staggering - most of it Mexican products such as Modelo and Corona beer bottles, Bimbo bread products, and Mexican candy wrappers.
Ditto for the beaches which I used to pass on my way to work - after a weekend, there is trash freaking everywhere.
Just look at the acres of trash left after the Dakota Access Pipeline left in North Dakota!!
The worst was the Washington Mall after Earth Day.
A lot of people are slobs wherever they go, so why not at Lake Meade too? My town has a nice beach on Lake Michigan. It gets trashed too, and people who aren’t slobs wind up picking it up. There are trash recepticles at the beach, but somehow the slobs don’t make the connection. The same is true in town. There are trash recepticles all along the main drag, but I often see trash on the ground next to the recepticles.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.