Barnegat Bay Blitz aims to clean up the shoreline
BARNEGAT LIGHT, N.J. (WPVI) -- Volunteers at the Jersey Shore spent the day cleaning up one popular spot in hopes of keep trash out of the ocean and keeping the area beautiful for the summer.
They call it the Barnegat Bay Blitz, a single day where hundreds of schoolchildren environmentalists and others comb through the marshes, beaches and shorelines of the Barnegat Bay estuary to pick up trash.
"This is good focus to have a single event so people realize it needs to be done and hopefully it'll be done every day. When people see something, they take care of it," Michael Fitzpatrick of the Long Beach Township Beach Patrol said.
The cleanup is accomplished by volunteers. The kids are from the village elementary school in West Windsor and traveled over an hour and a half to Barnegat Light to participate.
"We take what we learned about the environment and about being global citizens and we connect them to come down here and pay it forward," teacher Vanessa Clax said.
"People are littering and it's wrong. First of all, it's illegal, second of all, it'll hurt the environment," student Advaidh Iyer said.
The Barnegat Bay watershed is 660 square miles and covers most of Ocean County.
Fertilizers, debris and other pollutants have left the bay unhealthy and degraded habitats for shellfish.
Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin told volunteers the state is trying to change that.
"And slowly we're doing that. It's going to take a long time to bring it all the way back, but shellfish are coming back, fish are coming back," Martin said.
Since it began in 2011, over 2300 cubic yards of trash and recyclables have been collected.
At Sedge Island off the north end of LBI, volunteers collected a boat full of debris pulled from the water and shoreline.
"Depends on whether the wind is blowing and where the waters washing things up. I think you got a lot of junk collecting up along the shoreline of all these islands," volunteer John Carlucci said.
