Laura Michet's Blog

I took pictures of the trash removal barge down at the beach

I think I've written about this before, but the closest LA-area river to my house - Ballona Creek - ends near Marina Del Rey, where an automated barge designed to remove trash from the river is constantly anchored.

I went down there a few nights ago to take pictures of it (and some plants). Here it is:

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The walk from one quay to the other is like 20 minutes even if you aren't stopping constantly to take pictures of random crap, so by the time I got around to the other side, it was dark as shit. The image here is misleading. It was even darker than it looks here.

The channel in front of the fishers in that picture is left open when there hasn't been a rain event, I think. The majority of trash apparently washes down the river when rain pushes it into the channel or increases the water level in the river, so they seem to only operate it at that time.

I've seen the barge in action, though it was a year or two ago at this point. Normally when I'm at the beach, it's not raining, so I assume that's why I haven't seen it working in a while. It lifts trash out of the waterway with the conveyor belt that sticks out of the roof, and dumps it into a row of dumpsters in the back of the vessel. It's easiest to see the dumpsters in the second picture but they're still not super visible.

I actually do not know if this barge is terribly effective! The county maintains a website that claims it's removed quite a lot of trash, but I don't know enough about this kind of technology to know whether this is like, good or bad or cool or not compared to other, similar technology (which I am so ignorant about that I can't even describe). This barge is the kind of thing I look at and think, "Cool! I have no idea if this is a stunt or not!"

I hope it's not a stunt. It is very neat to see in operation. Unfortunately, when it's raining, this is one of the last places in the city I want to go. And when the water level is high, the bike path floods, and I can't even get down here in the first place!