OAKLAND — He goes by “The Coastodian,” one man with a trash picker in hand, standing on the edge of Lake Merritt near a storm drain inlet, plucking out as much garbage as he can.
For the past three years, the first major rainstorm has brought Point Reyes resident Richard James to the lake. On Thanksgiving Eve, he stood on a walking path along Harrison Street. Five hours into his volunteer work, piles of debris lay at his feet.
The most eye-catching items were hypodermic needles. James counted at least 250 of them, near an inlet where trash from downtown Oakland flows, pushed by the heavy rains.
“The first flush is huge. How many more are in there?” he asked Wednesday evening as the region received its first significant storm of the rainy season.
James is the member of the Lake Merritt Institute, a community-based nonprofit of volunteers founded in 1992 to clean the lake. Its members pick up trash five days a week. Every Tuesday and Saturday, the institute sponsors volunteer clean ups and on Thursdays sixth grade students from nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal School pitch in.
The group estimates it pulls about 1,000 to 5,000 pounds of trash every month from the lake, the nation’s oldest wildlife refuge, which is about 140 acres with 3.4 miles of shoreline. Recent improvements connected the lake to the estuary and the bay through a channel, and James said he believes most of the trash he scooped up Wednesday could have come from the bay, through storm drains and from nearby homeless camps. Sixty-two inlets lead into the lake, he said.
James spends his days traveling to homeless camps and other dumping grounds, documenting the impact on the environment and waterways, from Oakport Street near East Creek Slough, to street trash finding its way into Lake Merritt.
As night fell on Wednesday, James packed dozens of bottles, lighters, bags of feces (he couldn’t tell if it was human or animal) and other plastics. He also found plenty of “bullets,” which are used to snort cocaine, ketamine or other drugs.
Some joggers stopped to thank him.
“I didn’t even put a dent in it,” he said, showing off a bottle of dumped hand sanitizer. “Maybe I should clean my hands.”