Operation SPLASH targets trash along LI's South Shore

A light, warm breeze blows off the water. In the distance, recreational boaters crisscross the Great South Bay while Capt. Barbara Ludwig, 58, of Massapequa, stands at the helm of a 24-foot powerboat as her three-man crew unties the ropes tethered to the dock in Massapequa Park.

But Ludwig is not setting out on a pleasure cruise from John J. Burns Park this Saturday morning. Instead, she and Ray Spina, 62, of Manhattan, Andy Sitterer, 54, of Massapequa, and Jim Loeffler, 58, of West Islip, are volunteers with Operation Stop Polluting, Littering, and Save Harbors (Operation SPLASH), a Freeport-based nonprofit environmental group that cleans up Long Island’s South Shore waterways from Atlantic Beach to Lindenhurst.

As Ludwig steers the boat into Massapequa Bay, she shouts, “Something’s on the right.” She twists the throttle to slow down, and Sitterer grabs a crabbing net to scoop up a child’s floating life jacket and a rotting piece of wood — just a fraction of the nearly 300 pounds of trash — including a beach chair, balloons, plastic and glass bottles, a 20-foot section of a dock, bottle caps and a cooler — that the crew will later recover, mostly from a salt marsh in Amityville.

“Keeping it [the water] clean is important,” says Ludwig, an insurance consultant who has volunteered for Operation SPLASH for more than 15 years. “I live on the water and go on the water in my own boat all summer long with my family, and we swim, and it has to be clean.”

Founded in 1990 by a Freeport college student, Operation SPLASH has collected more than 3 million pounds of trash. The nonprofit’s volunteers in five chapters operate seven boats, docked in Long Beach, East Rockaway, Freeport, Wantagh, Massapequa and Lindenhurst, and clean up 25 miles of coastline seven days a week, one or two times a day, from April to December.

Some of its 3,500 volunteers and supporters also educate community groups, the public at local festivals, and schools about the detrimental effects of garbage on wildlife and humans. Other volunteers host bay tours, lobby lawmakers to fund beach, bay and waterway restoration projects, and partner with marine scientists conducting research at Long Island universities and federal environmental conservation agencies.

“In a short span of time of 30 to 40 years, the bays and ocean have gone from paradise to nothing,” said Rob Weltner, 66, president of Operation SPLASH and a volunteer.

“We are trying to get the message out there that street trash becomes bay trash [by way of storm drains], which becomes ocean trash,” he said, adding that heavy rain or melting snow pushes trash clogged in storm drains into waterways.

More than an eyesore, trash can sicken and kill marine and coastal wildlife and threaten human health. Marine mammals, sea turtles and seabirds often mistake balloons and plastic waste, such as bags and bottle caps, for food. The trash blocks the intestines and fills the stomachs of wildlife, giving animals a false sensation of fullness and starving them to death.

Discarded or abandoned fishing nets (referred to as “ghost nets”) can entangle wildlife, creating life-threatening injuries, disrupting their feeding and interfering with their swimming ability, causing drownings. According to a 2021 report from the Marine Debris Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, hundreds of species of wildlife become ensnared in ghost nets and other garbage.

Complicating matters, studies show that plastic does not fully degrade, but breaks down into microbeads that are ingested by fish that mistake it for food and then are passed up the food chain to humans.

Experts say plastics and other trash also take a toll on the diversity of wildlife habitats like salt marshes and coastal islands where many species feed, breed and nest. The nonprofit’s volunteers help to restore habitats.

Maureen Bowie, a 46-year-old Operation SPLASH volunteer with the Freeport chapter, has been fighting to turn back the toxic plastic tide for five years. The reading teacher, who lives in Levittown, says keeping local waterways clean is a “gratifying experience.” “I’m glad that we can keep the area clean and have pride in our community,” she said.

Bowie recalled that during one recent cleanup, she and her crewmates removed plastic building material wrapped around the base of an osprey’s nest. “We pulled it off so that the ospreys could have their home back,” she said. “It’s little things like that that make a big difference.”

RECYCLED AND INCINERATED

The debris is hauled to the mainland and transferred to dumpsters provided by the Villages of Freeport and East Rockaway and the Towns of Hempstead, Babylon and Oyster Bay. Some plastic waste is recycled while other garbage is incinerated, said Weltner, of Freeport.

Even though almost all workers are volunteers, water cleanup is not cheap. Marine fuel, boat maintenance and utilities to keep Operation SPLASH’s headquarters humming cost the nonprofit more than $100,000 a year. Grants, donations, corporate team-
building events, educational programs and membership dues of $20 and up keep the organization afloat, Weltner said.

Operation SPLASH’s boats are hard-used and expensive to repair. The Long Beach chapter’s boat was recently deemed unseaworthy.

“It was a 23-year-old boat that hauled so much garbage that the boat got beat up. It can’t be fixed anymore,” said Weltner, who is building a replacement boat with other members. “We always want to be sure that volunteers are safe and comfortable on the vessels.”

SPREADING THE WORD

When it comes to collecting trash from the Freeport canals, Lisa Kalish, 38, a volunteer captain for the nonprofit for five years, has seen it all. While the Bellmore resident says she regularly collects garden-variety garbage — plastic bottles and bags, to-go containers, straws, coolers and cooler lids — she was stunned recently when she and her crew pulled a vacuum cleaner and a 30-gallon garbage pail from the water.

“When we find things like that, we wonder how they got there. It feels almost purposeful,” said Kalish, who grew up on the Bellmore canals with a deep respect for the water. “How can someone accidentally drop a vacuum cleaner and a trash can into one of the canals? It’s upsetting.”

Kalish, a high school teacher, hopes that spreading conservation information to younger people will reduce littering and plastic consumption.

After she discussed her volunteer work with her 11th- and 12th-graders, several students were inspired to launch We Need Green, the school’s new environmental club.

“The high school didn’t recycle because they couldn’t get a recycling company to pick up the trash. Now this club is figuring out ways to make this happen,” she said. “I tell them not to use single-use plastic bottles, and now they are using reusable water bottles . . . I push this knowledge to the kids, and it’s very exciting.”

David Swenson, 60, is also ditching plastic water bottles. Ever since the Lindenhurst resident signed up to volunteer with Operation SPLASH three years ago, he has changed his habits. “I’m being smarter about what I purchase,” he said. “Instead of [plastic bottles] ending up in the trash, I use a metal bottle and fill it with filtered water from my fridge to take to work. It also saves me money.”

Aside from Operation SPLASH’s mission to clean up South Shore waterways, it collaborates with several nonprofit environmental groups, including Seatuck Environmental Association in Islip, the Citizens Campaign for the Environment in Farmingdale and the Nature Conservancy in Manhattan.

For example, as part of research to investigate ecological health, Operation SPLASH helps Seatuck conduct bird and fish surveys in the western bays, said Seatuck executive director Enrico Nardone, who praised the group.

“They are cleaning the habitats that birds are using and making the shoreline and marshes accessible for foraging and nesting birds that otherwise would be degraded with trash,” he said.

LOBBYING EFFORTS

To shore up the ecosystem, Operation SPLASH lobbies lawmakers to increase pressure on government and business to change behaviors and take action.

In 2014, the nonprofit lobbied lawmakers for funding to install more than 4,500 street storm drain filters in Nassau County to prevent pollutants in rainwater, including trash, chemicals, motor oil and asbestos, from reaching waterways. To bring that message home, the group’s Adopt-A-Storm-Drain program asks grade-school students to raise awareness by placing stencils and decals with a pollution-prevention message near storm drains in towns across Nassau’s South Shore.

Since 2002, members have urged the state Department of Environmental Conservation to prohibit five South Shore sewage treatment plants from sending harmful nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich sewage into the western bays of Long Island. High levels of nitrogen promote algae growth that deprive sea creatures of oxygen, Weltner said.

“Operation SPLASH, along with the Nature Conservancy and Citizens Campaign for the Environment, spearheaded the upgrade of one of those plants, the Jones Beach Sewage Treatment Plant, in 2012,” he said.

The same year, the nonprofit lobbied the DEC once again to recommend an upgrade to the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant in East Rockaway that would direct sewage away from Nassau’s bays. As a result of its efforts, the Nassau County executive appointed the nonprofit to the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant Reconstruction Oversight Committee after Superstorm Sandy caused the plant to go offline, releasing millions of gallons of raw sewage into local waters.

AIDING RESEARCHERS

The nonprofit also facilitates research by Stony Brook University, Adelphi University, Hofstra University, the DEC and federal conservation agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey, by providing crewed boats and equipment.

Experts say grassroots environmental groups like Operation SPLASH play a critical role in gathering and sharing data on pollution that helps marine scientists.

“Environmental groups like Operation SPLASH are a set of eyes on the water,” said Christopher Gobler, professor and endowed chair of coastal ecology and conservation at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

“They are there to hold public officials accountable for clean water, and they are raising public awareness,” Gobler said. “By doing that, they are encouraging the public to hold their public officials accountable for clean water, as well. Beyond pushing for clean water, they know when things are awry. This is important for scientists, and as a scientist, myself, I have gotten reports from these groups that are invaluable.”

For example, in late 2020, Operation SPLASH members noticed scores of dead bunker or prey fish lining the shores of East Rockaway Bay. Weltner alerted Gobler, who sent a student team to collect water samples. The scientists conducted a field analysis and determined that unseasonably warm water along with a dense school of bunker fish concentrated in a small space depleted the oxygen in the water, Weltner said.

“We are not scientists,” he said, “but we speak the same language as the scientists and know when something is wrong.”

Weltner, at the helm of Operation SPLASH for more than 20 years, admits that the nonprofit’s cleaning campaign sometimes seems like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

“Every April [when Operation SPLASH returns to the water], we go out and see the same trash, like we were never there,” he said. “It’s frustrating, but if we don’t do it, who will? In every email I send out, I have the quote [from preservationist Robert Swan]: ‘The biggest threat to the planet is thinking that someone else will save it.’ You and me and all of us collectively need to be socially responsible for the next generation.”

WANT TO HELP?  

For those 16 and older, Operation SPLASH offers several volunteer opportunities, including boat maintenance and repair, building and grounds maintenance and repair, and positions as office assistants, boat crew members, festival booth workers and education team mentors of elementary, junior high and high school classes and small groups.

Individual volunteers pay $20 annual membership dues, and families of five or more pay $25.

For information or to volunteer, visit operationsplash.com or email info@operation splash.org.