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COURTESY PHOTOSHeal the Ocean workers showed up on Sunday and Monday to clear up trash and debris associated with a homeless encampment east of East Beach below the Clark Estate to Butterfly Beach in Montecito.
Heal the Ocean workers returned Monday to a homeless encampment to clean up associated trash and debris before it pollutes the water, just like they did last week when they found plastic, styrofoam, flammable liquids and containers filled with human waste just waiting for waves to wash them out to sea.
HTO Field Supervisor Harry Rabin and a sheriff’s deputy visited the same site, east of East Beach below the Clark Estate to Butterfly Beach in Montecito – what Mr. Rabin calls a “gray area” when it comes to law enforcement – as they did last week, Mr. Rabin told the News-Press.
They found the “last three holdouts” from last week’s visit near Butterfly Beach, including a man in a tent and a woman sleeping under a tarp, he said. They left after another woman showed up and encouraged them to go. Workers then cleaned up debris and trash they left behind – enough to fill a 6-yard bin.
Items removed from the beach included plastic, styrofoam, flammable liquids and containers filled with human waste.Christine, a 42-year-old from Idaho released from jail after serving four years for grand theft, had agreed previously to go but ended up returning, Mr. Rabin said.
“This is typical,” he said. “They say they want help and we try to get them help and they take off.”
Last week they found seven tents, debris and trash, things to keep warm, bicycles and foam rubber mattresses “that weigh 100 pounds when soaked,” he said. “It was a mess.”
It could have been worse had they not acted when they did, Mr. Rabin said, noting “there were 6-foot tides with swells coming in the next night, so we wanted to go in a day earlier.”
But they were too late to get it all. “A lot of debris already had gotten into the ocean,” he said.
Usually in these cases, a group called Earthcomb is called in to clean up, but in this case they weren’t available, so Mr. Rabin called Brian Borgatello of MarBorg Industries, who sent a team and equipment to get the items quickly off the beach.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Deputies accompanied the workers in an effort to convince residents of the encampment to remove their belongings and vacate the area.“By the next morning, the beach had been scoured by the sea, before all homeless camp items ended up in the ocean,” Hillary Hauser, HTO executive director, wrote in the group’s newsletter.
She added that Mr. Borgatello later called Heal the Ocean to say that MarBorg was donating its services to this cleanup effort.
It was fortunate that the ocean was the only victim because the situation posed a risk to the homeless as well, he said, noting that cliff-side boulders poised above them “could fall on them at any time.”
Four tent-owners packed up and left, taking their tents and belongings with them, he said. HTO picked up the remaining three tents, bundled them together and left them there.
Some of the homeless, including Christine, were reluctant to leave. “Of course she was drunk,” Mr. Rabin said. She walked away out of sight.
They had already spoken to her three times, but she refused counseling and an offer of housing, as do most of the homeless people they encounter, Mr. Rabin said. “They refuse to take it,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing.”
It’s not easy to get homeless people off the beach if they don’t leave voluntarily, especially because the area they set up in is located in a “gray area” between the city and county. The Sheriff’s Department has no enforcement power to act, while Santa Barbara can only issue three-day notices to leave, he said.
“It’s really complex to get them out of there,” he said. “They know the system and they continually beat it.”
But usually the sight of the deputies and Mr. Rabin and his K-9 companion is enough to make them evacuate – at least temporarily.
The homeless in that area actually have two encampments set up at the same time, he said. “They go back and forth,” he said. “One gets taken down and they go to the other one. This is what they usually do.”
Heal the Ocean uses drones and field inspections by volunteers patrolling the beach to look for any homeless encampments that pop up, Mr. Rabin said.
Once one is found, he, sheriff’s deputies and cleanup crews respond to take down the encampments and remove anything left behind before the ocean claims it. To date, cleanup crews have removed 30 tons of debris, he said.
“I don’t enjoy what I do,” he said. “It’s the tough part of doing this work (but) it’s hard from a personal perspective. I try to be empathetic and steer them in the right direction. I’m not here to say ‘Get the Hell out.’ I treat them as humanely as possible.”
email: nhartstein@newspress.com
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