After the wild overnight storm let up Saturday, going out for a fabulous long sunny walk on the Point (with spaces for cars to park!) was great.
However, I was reminded yet again that I’ve wanted to write and point out how futile and dangerous it is to use the new woven plastic sandbags at the beach. There were at least five large khaki-green ones distributed amongst the rocks and down onto the shore. Since it’s a wild and unbuilt-upon public beach, they’d obviously floated, sand-filled and all, down from Broad Beach or wherever they’d been piled in the first place.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon at my own stretch of sand — enormous black ones looking like misshapen seals languishing at 5-foot intervals, unraveling white ones trapped under algae-covered stones. Besides the fact of their ineffectuality — watching your money bob down the seafoam instead of saving your land from a watery end must be vexing indeed — the biggest problem with them is their arrival in the ocean proper. Seals think they’re squid, eat them and die. As do plastic bags from the grocery store, their indigestible material clogs the digestive system and, without a surgical intervention, that’s the end of that mammal!
I would like to propose to the City Council that public works along the sea be banned from using them. Mountain roads are one thing, but creekbeds and stormdrains which lead to the open sea should be limited to practical burlap. And, please, residents: be aware that this is not a good use of petroleum products … demand that your contractors use the older hemp version.
Beate Nilsen,
a 40-year lover of the ‘Bu