Collection Report Sep 3, 2011

Well, Irene came and went. On Sunday, August 28, cutting more westerly than expected, she hit Saco Bay, Maine with her east flank. 40-50mph winds rocked the coastline all day. But the worst & last of her winds came from W/SW. From inland out to sea. Here's her waning power on the evening of Sunday, Aug. 28:

Scour (Aug. 28, 2011, 6:30PM)

And here's Bay View the next morning, after the midnight high tide had come and gone:

And rinse (Aug. 29, 2011, 8:30AM)

And there you go. Hurricane/TS Irene ruined communities up and down the east coast. But at Bay View, all she left was an utterly clean slate. Not even a dollop of seaweed. All thanks to wind direction (and maybe to the long Saco River jetty a mile down south).

The rest of the week was warm & sunny. The perfect ending to an epic Maine summer. So it's little surprise that when I got back on September 3, there was junk. Though taking away this still-smouldering Bacchanal...

Poor showing

...the haul would have been small. (Note to partiers: Dumping your plastic in an open-air bonfire doesn't make it go away. Pretty much everything you did here reflects badly on you.) As it was, the haul wasn't small. Zone N:

146 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 36
• Fishing misc.: 2 (rope scrap, buoy scrap)
• Food-related plastics: 22 (4 cups, 5 food wrappers, 4 straw wrappers, 2 cup lids, 3 bottlecaps, 2 bottles, straw, gum)
• Food-related metal/glass: 19 (14 cans, Jaegermeister bottle, beer bottle, 2 bottlecaps, foil wrapper)
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 19 (5 bags/scraps, 1 bottlecap, 4 toy scraps, 5 scraps >1", 4 scraps <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 35 (34 filters, 1 packaging)
• Paper/wood: 10 (9 paper scraps, 1 wood firecracker stick)
• Misc./unique: 3 (2 fabric pieces, battery)

After all of Irene's fury, Bay View Zone N got maybe 2-3 pieces of ocean-borne debris. A bit of rope, a buoy scrap, and maybe this stained, abraded bottle cap:

The stories you could tell...

On the other hand, Irene probably blew away 40-50 cigarette butts (edit: 40-50 from Zone N; probably hundreds from the rest of Bay View), and who knows what else?

Zone S, always low on litter this year, offers little more enlightenment:

28 finds:

• Building materials: 0
• Foam/Styrofoam: 19 (!)
• Fishing misc.: 1 (rope twine)
• Food-related plastics: 2 (scrap of spoon/fork, straw)
• Food-related metal/glass: 0
• Nonfood/unknown plastics: 2 (1 scrap >1", 1 scrap <1")
• Cigarette filters/plastics: 4
• Paper/wood: 0
• Misc./unique: 0

The only thing of note: the spike in styrofoam over the usual Zone S finds.

A day after the storm, I watched a video of a 140-year-old covered bridge in Vermont washing away into splinters from the raging torrents. That was Irene's reality for so many of my fellow Northeasterners. At Bay View beach, ~20 pieces of styrofoam may well be the best -- the only -- evidence for Irene. With that, and the removal of one wonky tree along the 3-mile route between my condo and the beach, she was well and truly gone from Saco, Maine. We got lucky. My heart goes out to those who didn't.