Volunteers work to clean the sands of Elmer’s Island

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Our View: School board vote expected to top polls
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It took 40 volunteers only four hours to sweep the Gulf side of Elmer’s Island, a state-owned, 230-acre wildlife refuge and popular weekend spot for locals.


“We try to do one a year, at least,” Julie Lightner, a biologist with the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said of the June 2 cleanup. “We did one last August, but it was too hot.”

The August 2011 event was held during the workweek and drew only 15 volunteers. “But we still filled up one big dumpster with garbage,” Lightner said.


LDWF relies on beach sweeps to keep Elmer’s Island clean since the area doesn’t have a regular trash patrol. The nearby town of Grand Isle often rakes the beach to keep litter at a minimum.


Sadly, like surrounding coastal beaches with a high volume of visitors, Elmer’s Island experiences its share of waste, according to Lightner.

“The Fourchon beaches probably experience the same amount of trash Elmer’s does,” she said, watching a tractor pull a rake across the sand. “Grand Isle is clean. It gets raked every day. We really depend on people to pick up their own trash when they come to Elmer’s.”


Compounding the island’s trash problem is the debris washed ashore from outlying oil rigs and tossed overboard by recreational and commercial fishermen.


“Lots of things blow off rigs and boats,” Lightner said. “We see salt bags from shrimpers, vegetables from offshore rigs, glass and plastic bottles, crab traps, hard hats and buckets.”

“The island is a big bird nesting area, and things like six-pack [beverage] rings cause the most problems for birds,” said Kristen Wray with Grand Isle Community Development.


Several community groups participated in the event, including Barefoot Wine and Bubbly, the Louisiana Wildlife Federation, LDWF, Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program, the town of Grand Isle and the Nature Conservancy.


“It’s the first time we’ve had one of these in Louisiana in a long time,” said Crystal Cox, Barefoot Wine and Bubbly Louisiana market specialist said as she registered volunteers, handed out muffins, gloves, trash grabbers and T-shirts. She also issued last-minute warnings to participants on safety issues such as not touching any tar balls they may have encountered.

“I know we haven’t sponsored one in the last five years, since I’ve been here, and it may be the first one,” she said.


The Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project, started in 2007, cleans up 20 beaches from coast to coast each year.


La. 1 Coalition Executive Director Henri Boulet and his 17-year-old son Andre were among the volunteers gathering bottles and pieces of carpentry wood from the sand.

“It’s good that people are coming out and helping,” Henri Boulet said. “I read about the event and told my son, ‘Let’s go.’ There were lots of people fishing out here last weekend, and seeing them out here is encouraging as it relates to our tourism economy and helps fund our bridge project.”


Traffic into the refuge was steady the first Saturday in June as four-wheel drive trucks – their beds full of fishing poles reach straight toward the sky – lined the road. By afternoon, more than 60 vehicles were situated along the shore. Some visitors brought barbeque pits, tents and crab lines. Others arrived with a lawn chairs, casually watching as youngsters and dogs frolicked in the water. Offshore, boaters anchored near the shore to catch an early morning bite. As the anglers moved further out, pods of dolphins began bobbing in the surf nearby.


Just down the shore from Boulet and his son, Dylan Readenour, James Bell, Alex Richoux and Walter Theriot, all of Grand Isle, were working to remove a tangle of water hoses, a hose spool and boating rope from the sand.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Bell, laughing, as he broke a second shovel handle trying to extract the mass.

Clarence Dwyer, owner of Grand Isle Suites, arrived and tied the sandy snarl to his bumper and pulled the unearthed pile to the dumpsters, which had been placed on the island for the beach sweep.

“We tried to pull it up with our hands last time we were out here, but we couldn’t,” said LDW Senior Agent Thomas Dewitt as another truck pulled up with a sand-encrusted shrimp net attached to its trailer hitch. “We hoped the sand would wear down a bit before we tried again.”

Dewitt and other LDWF agents were patrolling the beach and collecting bags of trash gathered by the volunteers.

Further down the beach, several families joined the effort. Amanda Dalby and her daughter Kaley, both of Larose; Lanie Baragona and her mother, Wanda Guidry, of Cut Off; and Grand Isle resident Cathy Funk and her 15-year-old twin granddaughters, Caitlyn and Dominique Gerin, both of Baton Rouge, were filling trash bags.

“It was fun, getting to clean up the beach and pick up trash,” Lanie Baragona, a second-grader at Cut Off Elementary said, her smile showing through a layer of sand on her face. Lanie and Kaley Dalby, a first grader at Larose Lower, are members of Girl Scout Troop 20043 and were participating in the beach sweep to fulfill their community service hours.

“My granddaughters spend the summer with my husband Irv and I, and we are always volunteering for projects like this,” Funk said. “We’re either helping pick up trash, finding treasures or helping plant things along these beaches.”

Funk views the event as a great way to meet people as well as educate future generations about the merits of conservation.

“I grew up in the Adirondacks of New York,” she said. “I learned that what you drag in, you drag out. This is a good way to teach kids not to litter.”

“We’ve stayed down here every summer since Hurricane Katrina,” Caitlyn said. “I like being close to the ocean.”

“It sounded fun when our grandma told us about it,” Dominique said. “I like finding cool shells on the beach.”

The twin’s compliments were refreshing sentiments for a location that is precariously located – a winding shell road through the marsh is all that connects the island to La. Highway 1 – and is still recovering from the effects of the BP oil spill.

“Elmers was heavily oiled after the BP spill,” Lightner said. “It was shut for a year with cleanup operations. They are still cleaning up, mostly during the week, to avoid the busy weekends. They are checking for tar balls and tar mats.”

The next planned event to help keep the popular area clean is slated for the fall.

“The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana will be partnering with Abita Beer to rebuild and add more dune fences,” Lightner said.

Alex Richoux, left, and James Bell, both workers for the town of Grand Isle, work to remove a mass of rope and water hoses from the sand as fellow worker Walter Theriot looks on. It eventually took a pickup truck to pull the tangle from the sand.

CLAUDETTE OLIVIER | TRI-PARISH TIMES