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Volunteers clean South Boston beaches

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 6, 2009 07:21 PM

By Jazmine Ulloa, Globe Correspondent

South Boston beaches lie about 2 miles from the city's downtown. Yet an abundance of blue mussels and tiny seashells pave their sands. Even eelgrass grows in small patches along the shore.

Those are just a few of the signs that Tony LaCasse said point to new life springing up on the city's beaches after Boston embarked on a multibillion-dollar cleanup of its harbor in the early 1990s.

LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, was one of the organizers of the aquarium's beach cleanup today as a part of its celebration of World Oceans Day. The weekend-long event, intended to promote ocean care and protection, ends today with an open-air festival in the plaza in front of the aquarium that will include games, activities, and music.

"We have spent so much money on improving water quality, it's just in good sense for us to keep our beaches clean," LaCasse said. "This is about giving back to our public spaces."

About 150 volunteers picked up litter and ocean debris yesterday at beaches in South Boston, Revere, and Quincy. More than a dozen trekked along Pleasure Bay and Carson Beach around midday, black garbage bags in hand. Siobhan Cunningham, who was originally from Worcester, said she grew up reading articles in the Globe about Boston's "disgusting beaches," and was surprised to find the shores so clean.

"The most we have found is an abundance of cigarette butts," she said.

With the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation facing deep cuts in its budget, such efforts will be crucial to maintain the quality of the city's beaches, LaCasse said. The department spent more than $36.3 million last year on cleanup and maintenance of the state's 88 beaches from Salisbury to Nantucket; this year, its budget may be reduced to a third of that sum, according to the aquarium.

Ellie Spring, who was playing with her dog at Pleasant Bay as the volunteers picked up, said she has lived in Boston all her life and remembers when the waters were a murky brown. She organized beach cleanups when she was younger and thanked the "younger generation" cheerfully for its work. But to keep the beaches clean, she said, everyone needs to do his or her part.

"For every one person that cleans up the beach, there are 15 others who will just dump something into the ocean without a thought," Spring said. "It's a neverending battle."