In just two hours, commercial divers hauled up all this junk Saturday and loads more from the bottom of the Elizabeth River, in a small cove near Town Point Park and Waterside in downtown Norfolk.
The cleanup, called the Town Point Trash Dive, was the first of its kind in Virginia and only one of a handful in the United States, done to commemorate Earth Day, which is Thursday.
“We wanted to do something different for Earth Day, and this definitely was it,” said Karen Scherberger, executive director of Norfolk Festevents, the outdoor-party group that sponsored the daylong effort.
Dozens of curious people strolled by the piles of junk on display along the city docks and marveled.
“Is this from a shipwreck?” asked Charlene Goggins, visiting from Oklahoma.
“My God, this is unbelievable,” said her husband, David . “It makes you wonder how much else is dumped in our rivers. It’s disgusting.”
The running joke of the day among the divers and crews was who would find the first dead body.
Then, about mid-morning, a team from Precon Marine Inc. discovered what appeared to be a shoulder or hip bone. Police soon arrived and took the bone away in an evidence bag. They gave it to a member of the medical examiner’s office.
The joke was definitely over.
The idea for the cleanup stemmed from a Festevents volunteer and photographer, Rosemarie O’Grady, who participated in a similar underwater cleanup last fall in a small town in Sweden.
“It’s all about awareness,” O’Grady said. “You look at the water and say how pretty it looks. But when you go look underneath, you see a much different picture. It can startle you.”
Charles Smith, a diver from Crofton Diving Corp. of Portsmouth, spent 45 minutes on his hands and knees on the bottom of the cove, feeling for junk.
“You can’t really see anything, it’s so dark down there,” Smith said. “It’s sort of like being in a closet.”
Among the items he recovered were the wheelchair, the oyster-laden ladder and a plastic fedora.
“It’s Freddy Krueger’s hat,” Smith said with a grin.
Kenny Crofton, vice president of Crofton Diving, sits on the Festevents board of directors. When the cleanup idea came up weeks ago, Crofton agreed to recruit other companies to pitch in. They agreed.
All of the trash was to be recycled or taken to a landfill, said John Paul Wright, of Weeks Disposal, a Chesapeake company that volunteered its services.
Tires and metal can be recycled, Wright said, and big chunks of wood can be shredded and made into landfill cover.
“It’s a good cause,” said a diver from W.F. Magann Corp. who goes by the name Pino.
“We should do this more often,” he said, “cover other spots. It should be beautiful down there, but too often it’s not.”
VICKI CRONIS-NOHE | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
one dirty job Mike Bremus surfaces after about 45 minutes of searching the bottom of the Elizabeth River for trash Saturday. Several teams of divers took part in the Earth Day cleanup.
VICKI CRONIS-NOHE | THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Charles Smith of Crofton Diving spent part of Saturday in the Elizabeth River, clearing it of trash, foreground, for the Town Point Trash Dive. The event was a first for Virginia.