By BREEANA LAUGHLIN/YachatsNews.com
WALDPORT – Thomas McIntosh drives the back roads of the Coast Range as a form a stress relief.
But what he saw on a forest jaunt last week did anything but that. People had turned an area along a forest road east of Eckman Lake into a large, illegal dump.
“I was astounded by it and took some pictures,” said McIntosh, admitting that his first instincts were to air his frustrations on social media. “But I couldn’t gripe about it without doing something. Complaining about a problem without a possible solution is just complaining. I’m just going to do something.”
So in a post on the Waldport Community Facebook page, McIntosh described what he found, said he was going to clean up the trash and invited anyone who would like to help. A friend, Krista Tunstall, offered to create an event page for the cleanup.
The post reached hundreds of people, including Kyle Mitchell of Yachats and Chris Carlson of Waldport, owner of C.P. Carlson Builders, the area’s largest homebuilding company.
On Monday, Mitchell and Carlson brought trailers and the four of them rolled up their sleeves and spent hours shoveling, raking, picking up and loading trash into the trailers.
“My family has been in the Waldport area since the early 1900s. I feel connected to the land,” said McIntosh, who lives in Newport and works in the meat department at Fred Meyer. “It frustrates me and my family. We have strong roots here and we don’t like seeing this happen. It’s not our mess but it is our land. This is our home and we can’t just be doing that.”
Mitchell said he wanted to volunteer to clean up the site because he felt a sense of duty to make the world better in whatever way he can. Carlson hoped to set an example to other community members.
“I love the outdoors and I hate the fact that this continued dumping will close down the forest that we love to recreate in,” Carlson said. “By setting an example, coming out and helping clean this up, hopefully more people will volunteer to help.”
Carlson said he also hopes their effort – and the problem of forest dumping – will get more attention from Lincoln County officials.
“… maybe it will bring some awareness to our county commissioners that this is a problem,” he said. “The sheriff has a deputy assigned to the problem but having someone assigned to it and actually getting something done about it are two different things.”
The group of volunteers cleared the area of trash while filling each of the two trailers to the brim. They took the trash to Dahl Disposal, which waived its disposal fees in light of the volunteer cleanup.
Sheriff’s forest deputy sidelined
Lincoln County Solid Waste District manager Paul Seitz told YachatsNews that there are several programs to provide education and information about trash disposal, rates and services, as well as efforts to combat illegal dumping.
The response to illegal dumping can vary due to the variety of private and public landowners in the county as well as the sheer scale and amount of public and private forestland, Seitz said.
“The county has a partnership with 16 forestland owners so that people can use and access private timberlands for public use – such as hiking and hunting – if we can patrol and make sure people don’t dump illegally,” he said.
However, the patrolling of these areas is temporarily suspended because of staff shortages within the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office.
“The district is going to step up and work with landowners more aggressively during this time,” he said.
Seitz recommends that people who come across a dump site call the sheriff’s non-emergency line at 541-265-0777 to report the issue. Deputies may be able to determine who owns the land, he said, or look for identifying information in the trash to determine who is doing the illegal dumping.
There are also safety considerations for removing trash, Seitz added. In addition to hazardous material, older motorhomes and boats may contain asbestos and require a professional to remove, he said.
While it is still a problem, Seitz said the amount of illegal dumping has gone down in recent decades.
In the 1970s there was a quite a lot of attention on the issue because the amount of people trashing the forests became so large. The inception of the county’s forest patrol program in the 1990s helped with the decline in the number of illegal dump sites, he said.
The cause of illegal dumping is hard to pinpoint, according to the Seitz.
“It is a behavior that has many different origins,” Seitz said. “It can be avoiding dollars, but it can also be an issue of convenience or, just simply, a person who isn’t doing the right thing.”
One down, more to go?
McIntosh was pleased with the effort to clean up the site near Eckman Lake and said he planned to return to the area to help make sure it didn’t happen again.
“I love the back roads and it breaks my heart to see gates put up and areas being closed off,” McIntosh said.
McIntosh said he isn’t exactly sure why people illegally dump their trash.
“Who knows? You can always talk about politics. But we have a lot more homeless in the community with the housing crisis and people living in trailers and motor homes they can’t afford.
“It’s sad really,” he said. “It’s a problem I found and I am glad I have found helpers to help me out with it.”
- Breeana Laughlin is a Waldport-area freelance writer who can be reached at Breezylaughlin@gmail.com
