Description

Two days ago, my wife and I spent over an hour of our time picking up and removing garbage from the rock beach at the end of the Pardee seawall. This morning, just two days later we walk to the end of the seawall to find that someone (or a group of people/kids) had flipped over the cement garbage container and dumped EVERYTHING (a huge overflowing garbage can's worth) into the water!! This is the same garbage can that we put our bags of collected trash into just two days earlier... and could now SEE them back floating in the water! Along with just a TON of other trash... the whole beach is totally covered!

Honestly I've had ENOUGH of this (and we see it every summer)! As a community, we should be OUTRAGED! I do not understand how someone could do this with no thought to what it does to RUIN this beautiful area we get to live in and need to work together to protect. Most of all we should be concerned over the generational impacts it will have on the quality of the water and wildlife in our area... Enjoy fishing on the new pier? Or kayaking along the shoreline? Or swimming at Lighthouse Point? Now dump a can of garbage on it.

As I see it, three things need to happen:

1. The Parks Department NEEDS to increase its pickup and collection of trash. We've seen other posts showing the constant overflowing of trash in the park's containers and on the new fishing pier. We walk on the seawall every day, and just yesterday we were commenting on how all the trash cans were overflowing once again. We can't continue letting these bins become targets for vandals/people who have nothing better to do with their time than ruin good things for everyone else. I also will be reporting this on SeeClickFix.

2. We need to increase our presence of policing, whether that's more NHPD in the Cove at night (which probably won't happen) or simply having more neighbors keeping a watch on our streets and parks and stepping up to say something! I myself stopped a couple of teenagers who were destroying property on that same beach just two days ago (the same day we initially picked up the garbage). Maybe we should think about forming a more organized neighborhood watch at this point?

3. Parents need to talk to their children and teens about the costs and effects of vandalism and hold them accountable to cleaning up their messes. I don't know for a fact who dumped the garbage into the water, but I can tell you we have seen a couple of groups of teens in the park late at night all this week (mostly getting high on the same benches that are right next to that knocked over garbage can). This behavior needs to be stopped. If it were my kid, I would want to know... and I can tell you, they would be down there cleaning it up right now.

I know everyone on here loves Morris Cove as much as we do... we have to do everything we can to protect it.