galveston1602

Living here (on the island) I may have a perspective of this that is missed by some of the people here who only visit on the weekends... 1. The beaches behind the seawall are scraped (and fluffed) everyday starting I believe at 4:00AM they are usually done by 8 ish. I see this everyday on my way to work so i know it happens. On particularly bad days for sargasum they will start using front end loaders to scoop up the seaweed after dark the night before. There is usually a crew of 6-8 people walking down the seawall and the beach picking up trash (im not saying they are the best but they are trying) The sargassum is raked on the west end occasionally at the request of the different neighborhoods (this varies based on who is in charge) 2. The monster sized mats of sargasum that float in during the spring and early summer would probably be 3-5' deep if they werent scraped daily, what this means is that even if the beach was cleaned 2 or 3 times a day the sargasum can wash up so quickly as to make it look like the beach isnt cleaned at all. obviously they cant clean the beach other than first thing in the morning for safety reasons. 3. The city digs sand from various places on the island and trucks it in to the beaches on the seawall. They seem to do this every other year or so. they spend millions doing this only to see it all get washed away! I'd like to see them look into other ways to keep the sand on the beach instead of spending more money on something thats only temporary http://www.rexross.com/reversingshoreline.html 4. The water does get to looking like chocolate milk alot of times. But, during the months of may-sept when the wind dies down for a few days in a row the water gets a nice green look to it. I have a window office on the 12th floor of the anico building in downtown and there are times during the year when you can see the clear "blue-green" water line less than a mile out. all in all id say that about 50% of the "prime time" beach season the beach water is decent looking. 5. Cleaning up the areas on the seawall where there is no beach is very dangerous because of the slick rocks and crashing waves and even still when it gets somewhat calm the city has crews out crawling among the rocks to pick up the trash and large driftwood. In the mornings you can tell when they are doing this because the top level of the seawall is literally covered in trash being thrown up to the trucks working above! I will agree that we as a city can and should do more but I think the easiest thing the city could do is have an aggressive policy of enforcing littering laws.