It was high tide off of Outer Brewster Island last Wednesday as Mike McDevitt’s boat appeared out of the fog, approaching a narrow spot between two large rocks where a wooden raft was piled with debris.
“If I can get that, we’ll get it, OK?” he called out to Laura Ludwig of the Center for Coastal Studies, who was on another boat.
“This is all ledge and rock and very, very steep cliffs, so you can’t really put a boat in anywhere except the two gulchesm, and then only at certain tides,” Ludwig explained.
As Ludwig watched nervously, McDevitt managed to navigate in between the rocks, attach a rope to the raft piled with material that volunteers had collected — wooden beams, hunks of metal, plastic and other debris — and tow it off the island.
Outer Brewster and four other islands are the focus of an unprecedented cleanup effort in which federal, state and nonprofit agencies working together with an army of volunteers. The five islands are part of the larger Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park, which is considered a treasure just minutes from downtown Boston. Since the park’s creation in 1996, this is the first concerted cleanup to remove debris that has washed up and accumulated on the islands.
Much of the trash was hauled off in giant white sacks that can hold up to 64 cubic feet. That’s in addition to scrap metal, buoys, wood and other items too big for the sacks.
The cleanup was expected to wrap up by Sunday, but bad weather toward the end of the week hampered those efforts. The groups are still working on getting trash off the islands. Ludwig said last week they hauled 64 sacks filled with garbage off the island, but there are still 31 sacks and 200 discarded lobster traps they need to remove.
“These are the outermost islands of Boston Harbor, and they get very little attention from other humans,” Ludwig said. “There’s really never been a concerted cleanup effort. This is trash that’s accumulated on the tops of islands, every corner of the islands because of overwash from winter storms over many, many decades.”
The Boston Harbor Islands are managed by a collaboration of 11 federal, state, city and nonprofit agencies. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Center for Coastal Studies worked with all those agencies for the last two years to coordinate this cleanup project.
On Calf Island, volunteers piled rusty scrap metal and old lobster traps on the beach. Ludwig said the metal was actually the remains of decades-old trash barges from back when some of the islands were used as landfills.
Ludwig’s boat pulled up and they got to work loading it on board, to bring it to Hull, where it will be taken away. Much of the debris will be recycled, and some will be saved for use by artists and other projects.
Ludwig’s boat pulled up to Lovell’s Island, where a team of students from the “green club” at Hull High School had gotten the day off to comb the beach for smaller bits of trash.
“We found a lot of wood, and a lot of bobbers from fish nets, a lot of soda cans,” one student said, digging through a bucket of garbage. “A lot of cigarette butts,” added another.
This kind of trash is terrible for the ecology of the island, including nesting birds. Ludwig grabbed a syringe from one of the students.
“Sharps should never go in your buckets,” she instructed as the students stood around her. “They should only go in a water bottle with a cap on it or in a sharp container.”
Despite the huge amount of debris being hauled away, cleaning a few islands is just a drop in the bucket, Ludwig said, when you consider the amount of trash out there in the ocean. But it’s been a real success, she said, and everything they’re finding out there is a reminder.
“We need to start understanding our own role in this,” she said. “This is the blame is on all of us. And also the solution is with all of us.”
