Cars driving along Portola Drive on Saturday honked and cheered at the dozen or so volunteers collecting plastic from the roadside.

The volunteers were participating in the 46th coastal cleanup, hosted by Clean Oceans International (COI), as well as One People One Reef and Surfrider, that kicked off Memorial Day weekend on May 27.

Based at the KSCO radio station for the day, community members took to the streets and coastline to scour for any piece of plastic—big or small—and dispose of it properly.

While the event didn’t have as large a turnout as previous years (at times well over 100), volunteers came together with the collective goal of making the ocean a cleaner place.

“I think it’s really important,” volunteer Gene Ratertae said. “People get the connection between trash on the street and nasty stuff in the water.”

The coastal cleanups initially began as a project for Cabrillo College oceanography students, but quickly became a perennial mission to apply their knowledge of ocean conservation.

After a year and a half hiatus during Covid, the coastal cleanups are now in a revamping stage.  Radio stations KPIG and KSCO have highlighted the events and encouraged participation in the cleanups.

Even with these efforts, the cleanup turnout was smaller than expected. 

The previous 45 cleanups have yielded an average of about 1,000 pounds of plastic removed from local beaches and roadsides. This time around, volunteers were able to remove over 40 pounds of plastic from the environment.

“I was a little bit disappointed with our low turnout today, but not that disappointed that it’s going to stop me from doing this again,” COI education director David Schwartz said.

Small But Mighty

COI is a small but growing non-profit based in Santa Cruz that aims to convert plastic waste into diesel fuel and provide plastic waste assessment of local beaches.

The organization uses Portable Plastic to Fuel technology to break down plastic waste through a vaporization process. This technology converts the waste at a rate of about one liter of diesel fuel additive for every kilogram of plastic with little to no harmful waste—and is achieved through a vaporization process called pyrolysis which encapsulates toxic chemicals rather than releasing them.

Until a diesel fuel converter is accessible in Santa Cruz County, the plastic collected over the last 46 cleanups was recycled as much as possible, while the rest was sent to landfills.

Some people, frustrated with the fees local landfills require, opted to dump their garbage in places like the San Lorenzo river tributary which flows directly to the Monterey Bay.

For the first time, the Santa Cruz Alliance for Ocean Conservation organized the coastal cleanup, which is a coalition of COI, One People One Reef and Surfrider—all of whom strive to protect Monterey Bay from plastic pollution.

“We decided maybe it could be to our collective benefit if we form an alliance where we could share outreach and education,” said Shwartz. “We all have our own niche.”

Twice a year since the early 1990s, the coastal cleanups have removed a grand total of around forty thousand pounds of plastic in Santa Cruz from Sunny Cove to Pleasure Point.

For every piece of plastic removed, two were ready to take its place.

Just like incentivising recyclables has drastically reduced the amount of bottles and cans aimlessly strewn throughout the community, converting plastic into diesel fuel could have a similar effect on the world’s oceans. While only 9 percent of current plastic waste is recycled, researchers are working to commercialize the process and reduce global plastic waste.

For now, plastic pollution remains a massive problem for the environment—and a sore sight for eyes.

“The more that you start looking, the more you see,” volunteer and Cabrillo oceanography teacher Lauren Hanneman said. “It’s not the big pieces but the little ones, the ones you don’t pay attention to.”

The Santa Cruz Alliance for Ocean Conservation plans to host the next coastal cleanup in late October, with more details to come on the COI webpage.

Santa Cruz and Monterey counties are holding a job fair at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Pájaro on Wed. June 7 to help support flood victims.

The event is being led by the the Monterey County Workforce Development Board and the Santa Cruz County Workforce Development Board, according to a media release.

“We’re reaching out to the community to attend and hope that flood victims, jobseekers and employers will come out to support Pájaro residents,” said Monterey County Workforce Development Executive Director, Christopher Donnelly.

This is the latest in recent efforts to revitalize the economy of Pájaro after the devastating flood that inundated the town in March 2023. 

After being displaced by the flood, residents returned to damaged dwellings, destroyed possessions and a devastated agricultural sector that employed many of the area’s migrant farmworkers. The job fair is aiming to connect job seekers and employers in both counties to help get flood victims back on their feet. 

A total of 20 employers will participate and those interested in getting involved are encouraged to sign up quickly to claim a spot. This event follows other efforts to support the community here.

From April 28-30, the Shop Pájaro event was held to help local businesses recover after the flood damaged many in town. The weekend-long event boosted establishments struggling to return to normal operations more than a month after the March flood.

On April 10, the Monterey-Salinas Transit Board of Directors approved a free fare zone for riders making stops in Pájaro. The free rides will be in effect until June 30, according to the MST website.

Now, local officials are hoping to get residents back to work.

 “We’re happy to be hosting the event in an effort to spur economic improvement to an area that’s been severely impacted due to flood damages,” said Donnely. 

The Pájaro Job Fair will take place from 1-4pm on Wed. June 7 in the tent at Our Lady of the Assumption Church at 100 Salinas Road in Pájaro. 

In April, 20-year-old Beatriz Lopez returned to the ramshackle apartment she shares with 10 family members on Associated Lane, after spending 45 days in the emergency shelter at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds. That shelter closed on May 15 and the remaining evacuees still without a place to go are living in “non-congregate” shelters such as hotels.

She had also returned to work in a strawberry field in Watsonville, along with several family members. 

Lopez is one of the lucky ones. 

She is one of the many people who were displaced after a series of atmospheric river storms swept through the Central Coast. 

The storms caused grievous damage to hundreds of homes in Watsonville when Corralitos Creek crested, spilling into numerous neighborhoods and wreaking havoc in the largely senior community.

The situation peaked on March 11, when the Pájaro River broke through its levee. Torrents of water spilled into the tiny, mostly low-income town of Pájaro, forcing the evacuation of more than 2,000 people and damaging or destroying hundreds of homes. The waters also inundated surrounding farm fields.

Now, as residents trickle back home—and some return to work—many are still homeless and jobless, with no firm date in sight for either of those situations to be resolved.

“These people don’t have money,” says Dr. Ann Lopez, a physician who runs the Center for Farmworker Families.

Worse, many of the residents are undocumented and as such are ineligible for federal assistance.

“I don’t know how they think these people are supposed to survive,” Lopez says. 

State and Local Action

There is hope on the horizon. A bill by State Assemblyman Robert Rivas—Assembly Bill 513, also known as the California Individual Assistance Act—would bring financial assistance to storm and flood victims who are ineligible for state and federal assistance.

The bill is winding its way through the legislative process, most recently passing through the Appropriations and Budget subcommittees. AB 513 does have an urgency clause that would allow it to take effect immediately after passage. 

Senator Ana Caballero, meanwhile, is writing Senate Bill 831, which would create a pilot program to allow certain agricultural workers who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years to gain permanent legal status. The Senate Public Safety and Appropriations committees have so far approved that bill, which would take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

Community Bridges in Watsonville has begun doling out Wave 2 of its three-part financial assistance package, which includes disbursements of $1,450 to $2,750, depending on the size of their families and the level of damage their residences sustained.

Those funds come from donations and from Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County. They also come thanks in part to a $25,000 donation from the Union Pacific Railroad Foundation, which the Community Bridges accepted on May 25.

But in the meantime, people are struggling to find a way to feed their families. 

On May 23, Lopez says she received four phone calls from several people wanting Target gift cards to help pay household expenses. She also helps workers injured by slipping in the slick mud brought in by the floodwaters. Still others have developed rashes Lopez suspects were caused by the mud.

“There’s no work available, and they need food,” she says. “It’s not good, and there is no assistance at the state level and the federal level.”

Especially galling, Lopez says, is that both President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the Capitola Esplanade soon after the disasters, and the moneyed tourist mecca is now largely repaired.

“And here we have weeks and weeks since the flood, and people are still struggling,” she says. “I think it’s unconscionable, quite frankly, and I think we need to do better. And I think that Monterey County needs to be held accountable for the losses of both farming land and the losses incurred by all of these farm workers.”

Looking at the Numbers

Monterey County Director of Emergency Management, Kelsey Scanlon, told the Board of Supervisors at a May 16 meeting that 10,000 people were evacuated throughout Monterey County during the storms and floods. 

A total of 240 single-family homes in Pájaro were damaged, along with 42 multi-family residences and 81 commercial buildings. 

Those numbers are likely higher, Scanlon says, since inspectors were unable to access many properties.

Sanitation workers hauled away 9,021 cubic yards of debris, the equivalent of 346 truckloads, Scanlon says. That was in addition to 598 “white goods” such as washers, dryers, refrigerators and stoves.

Some 500 people stayed at the emergency shelter run by Monterey County, with 43,000 meals provided during the 65 days it was open, Scanlon says.

Roughly 240 people from 70 households are staying in hotels, a temporary shelter that comes with a somewhat onerous requirement: families must reapply every 21 days, a process that includes proving they are looking for housing.

“I get so angry that these people that provide us with food and are responsible for a 55 billion dollar industry in the state have no support, no safety net during these tough times,” Lopez says.

Mayra Bernabe, an organizer with Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action (COPA), says that the residents are also contending with the chemical-laden mud left over from the flood.

This and other debris gathers under the destroyed and abandoned vehicles. Street sweepers then kick up the dust into the air, where residents breathe it in.

“There is definitely a lot of continuous frustration and despair, and still a lot of work to be done for the full-on recovery,” Bernabe says. “There are definitely families and people who are still out of home or out of work. Some families are still seeing the effects of the mud that is still on the streets.”

The situation is even worse for families who earn too much—or whose residence did not sustain enough damage—to qualify for aid, but are still considered low-income, Bernabe says. 

“They’re unsure who’s going to help them,” she says. 

As the summer agriculture season begins to kick into high gear, there will be numerous workers jockeying for scarce jobs, Bernabe says. 

“There is a sense that there is not going to be enough work because of the fields on the Pájaro side that are still unharvestable,” she says.

Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director, Norm Groot, told Farm Progress that one-fourth of the county’s crop—an estimated $1 billion—could be lost this year. Some 2,500 acres of the county’s 12,500 acres of strawberry crops were lost, Groot says.

Bernabe says that the families that qualify for federal aid must still contend with the laborious process of first filing insurance claims and cataloging their losses before the Federal Emergency Management Agency will consider their applications.

“There are multiple things that need to be attended to and there are families in different diverse situations who need the help and assistance,” she says. “There is a lot of need and continued despair and frustration and stress of what might happen.”

But the crisis has had a positive outcome, Bernabe says. Many of the residents have been attending Board of Supervisors meetings to decry their situation and to demand the support they still need. 

“I have seen more residents becoming involved and being agents of change, and making sure they are speaking up for their rights to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Bernabe says.