Today is Earth Day, which San Diego traditionally celebrates with a monster traffic jam around Balboa Park, but also by reflecting on the environmentalist credo “Think Globally, Act Locally.”
To that end, I took a hike last week with Javier Hernandez, a young father who is so busy acting locally that I doubt he gives those vanishing rain forests a second thought.
Hernandez is organizing volunteers to clean up a half-mile stretch of Chollas Creek in Barrio Logan, where he grew up. It's one leg of the Creek to Bay Cleanup, hosted next Saturday by I Love a Clean San Diego.
You well may ask: Another Chollas Creek cleanup? Haven't they finished the job yet?
Not by a long shot.
The creek, which flows from Oak Park to San Diego Bay, is a magnet for litter and pollutants – and Hernandez believes the city bears some responsibility for its condition. More on that later.
On a map, Chollas Creek is a thin blue line. But where it passes Hernandez's home, it's a puddled concrete channel choking on urban debris: truck tires, soda bottles, carpet rolls, busted furniture and the usual fast-food litter.
“When I was a kid, I used to go down to the creek on my bike,” Hernandez told me. “We used to catch tadpoles and fish.”
Now it looks like a good place to catch hepatitis.
Hernandez is a soft-spoken 32-year-old who works as an environmental technician for a ship-repair company. He lives on a hill that overlooks the creek where it flows under National Avenue and Interstate 5.
We hiked along the bank, where Hernandez pointed out the homeless encampments, built from tarps and blankets and sheets of wood, whose occupants contribute to the trash problem.
I'd seen census figures showing how Barrio Logan's homeless population swelled once Petco Park pushed them out of downtown. But Hernandez has witnessed the boom firsthand.
“Let me give you a full idea of who lives here, what they do,” he said.
Like an archaeologist, he sorted through the clutter of an abandoned camp, quickly finding a heroin kit and crack pipe.
A few years ago, he said, there were so many shelters on the bank that it looked like a homeless strip mall – and functioned as one, providing one-stop shopping for drugs and prostitution.
He lobbied local officials to clean it up. He got no help from the city, he said, because the land belongs to Caltrans, a state agency. Eventually he took his photos to then-Assemblyman Juan Vargas, and within days, the camp was razed.
That experience whet Hernandez's appetite for community activism, which led him to organize the creek cleanup that will be held from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday.
And that led us to the subject of the small city-owned dirt lot on the corner of National Avenue and 33rd Street, where he's asking volunteers to gather.
The lot, which backs onto Chollas Creek, is clearly posted: No Dumping.
Yet its neighbors say that every other week, city street sweepers unload their collections there, leaving foul mounds of rubbish to sit for days before trucks arrive to haul it away.
Hernandez said the idea of an informal city dump beside a creek is “kind of twisted.”
That day the lot was vacant except for some Venetian blinds and, like every other vacant lot in town, a Steve Francis for Mayor poster on the fence – future landfill fodder.
Nearby, Hector Quiroga was fashioning metal in his shop, M.Q. Ornamental Work. He knew all about the lot.
“The city owns that lot. They've been dumping there for years and years and years,” Quiroga said. “A lot of people do it. They dump their trash there and eventually the city picks it up. When they pick up their own, they pick up the rest. I've been here 15 years and it's been going on all that time.”
I got a similar account from David Yee, who works across the street at Stoody Industrial Welding.
What kind of stuff winds up there? “Discarded sofas and stuff like that,” Yee said. “I've seen cabinets.”
Hernandez blames the city for setting a low standard for people's behavior. Thousands of people drive by that lot every day. Can you blame them if they throw garbage there, and some of it winds up in the creek? Can you blame the homeless who forage in the dump for building materials?
“If this was La Jolla would people put up with that?” Hernandez asked. “Cleaning up other areas – making them more beautiful – and then dump it on your street corner?”
I didn't have a good answer, but I figured Mayor Jerry Sanders might. The next day I asked one of his aides what was up.
After making some calls, the aide said he'd been told that street sweepers do indeed unload there, but that the trash is put in a bin and faithfully picked up by the end of the day.
I called Hernandez with that account. He said it wasn't true: No bin. No same-day pickup.
But he had some good news.
“The city is all over that parking lot today,” he said. “There've been at least two trucks there.”
Which means the mayor's office is paying attention.
“One guy got out, looked around, and picked up the Venetian blinds,” Hernandez said.
Which means the Chollas Creek cleanup is officially under way. The rest of us are invited to pitch in next Saturday.
Gerry Braun: (619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
