Volunteers clean up trash-strewn lot
Site near Knight High is popular for illegal dumping
PALMDALE — A man bends over and with two hands fiercely grabs hold of a tattered mattress. He pulls it out of a bush and drags it over to a clearing, leaving it on top of a pile of debris that includes bags of unused concrete and the remnants of a wood palette.
The roar of a tractor grows as it approaches the spot where the pile is building. Its arm raises overhead and descends onto the debris, grabbing as much of it as possible before rumbling away to a nearby Dumpster.
Local volunteers converged where Avenue S and 70th Street East meet near Pete Knight High School on Saturday morning to clean up the area.
For the Community Coalition of the Antelope Valley, this was its third event at this particular location, but the grassroots organization has been actively working to combat illegal dumping for most of the year.
Eric Ohlsen, the organization’s founder, said he was tired of hearing excuses as to why nothing could be done to fight the dumping issue in the Antelope Valley and took it upon himself to get something started.
“We started our first week at the Amargosa (Creek) Trail on the Martin Luther King Day of Action,” he said.
Afterward, the organization turned its attention to Barrel Springs before taking on its current area of focus at Avenue S and 70th Street East.
Ohlsen said he has been consulting with Bruce Roadhouse, maintenance services manager for the City of Palmdale, on identifying high-impact areas that need to be cleaned up.
“He asked me to go look at that location,” he said. “When I went to go look at the location, I found a car out there.”
The City’s maintenance department has been providing some frontend loaders, porta-potties and crew members weekly for the clean-up events.
The organization has made it a point to host weekly clean-ups every Saturday to combat the ever-growing dumping issue that is affecting the Antelope Valley.
Local resident Jetro Elize, a patient
resource worker for the Los Angele County Department of Health Services, said that it’s an important issue to deal with because it’s not okay to dump in “our backyard.”
“I stay two minutes away from here, literally two minutes from Pete Knight high school,” he said. “And if you go down 70th Street, it’s dumping from contract dumping, residents that are leaving their old TVs or business partitions. We even found medical waste. Over 5,000 bags of medical waste, catheter bags, in this particular area.”
Elize said that when they were working on the Barrel Springs project, it “literally” looked like a landfill.
“We have illegal dumping coming in from areas that don’t affiliate with Palmdale — probably some do — and their dumping on hiking trails,” he said.
Elize also attributes the lack of monitoring as a cause of the dumping issues in the Antelope Valley.
Ohlsen said Palmdale City Attorney Christopher Beck wants to address this problem, and residents could be seeing some signs put up next week about the potential consequences of illegal dumping.
“The city attorney (put together) some language on some signs that talks about it could be a $10,000 fine and I think they’re going to mention on the sign that their vehicles can be impounded,” he said.
Veteran Chris Bellingham, who has previously worked as an environmental scientist for a solid waste division, said some of the issues surrounding illegal dumping are in the outreach and education of this particular problem.
“You’re just not communicating to most of the people about what the issue actually is.“he said.
Bellingham also said that a lot of the material is put out only in English. This hinders a large portion of the Spanish-speaking community who are uninformed and unaware of the problems associated with illegal dumping.
Ohlsen said he had a meeting with the nonprofit organization Salva to inform the Spanish-speaking community about available resources.
“We’re trying to come up with some sort of advertising campaign to get the word out on what the options are instead of illegal dumping,” he said.