Anyone lose a refrigerator in the last storm?
If it was fully stocked, it may be yours. You can pick it up at the Army Corps of Engineers debris yard in Sausalito.
Refrigerators are among the more unusual items fished out of bays and lagoons this month when days of rain, wind and high tides blasted Marin and the North Bay like a fire hose, washing all manner of hazardous junk into our waters.
“It’s been bad before, but we haven’t seen this amount of debris in the water in recent history,” said Priya Clemens, public information manager for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which operates the ferries. “There are the usual logs and rubber tires, but they’re also finding huge garbage bins, a refrigerator with food in it. There’s some crazy stuff out there in the water.”
During one recent storm, the Golden Gate ferry Napa sucked up so much debris in its four propulsion jets that they all had to be flushed out.
“That’s a process we can do ourselves,” Clemens said.
But there was more serious and expensive damage to the ferry San Francisco when it hit a submerged log, bending its propeller so badly that the prop had to be replaced.
“That was a $90,000 repair job that kept the ferry out of service for three days,” Clemens said. “That was really a hassle. But when it’s dark in the morning and at night during commute runs, it’s very difficult to see obstacles in the water.”
The bridge district sends out small boats, called Wavers, to look for flotsam and jetsam to scoop it out of the water before one of its ferries runs into it. The big, heavy stuff, though, is the job of the Army Corps of Engineers and its workhorse “drift collector,” an 87-foot-long catamaran, the John A.B. Dillard, that’s outfitted with a hydraulic crane designed to lift trees, logs and sections of docks and piers out of the water and onto the Dillard’s flat rear deck. It’s later dumped into the corps’ debris yard near the Bay Model.
“If we think it can put a hole in a ferry or damage a large prop we pick it up,” said Capt. Kixon Meyer. “Since the rain, there’s been a lot of trees and dilapidated pier pilings. We pick up boats that sink, a lot of refrigerators and every once in a while a car that’s gone off a launch ramp.”
How do refrigerators end up in the bay?
“Everyone asks me that question,” Meyer said, chuckling. “I think most of them come off barges. Most barges have refrigerators. And when they break, they just kick them off the edge.”
There’s no end to the weird stuff that ends up in the bay. Meyer was once startled by a Jacuzzi he spotted floating in the roiled up water after a storm. Fortunately, there was no one soaking in it. Nevertheless, he said, “It was an odd thing to see out there.”
Violent storms can tear small boats from their moorings and deposit them far from their berths in bayside marinas. Because of wind and tides, they often end up on the rocky Tiburon-Belvedere shoreline. Tiburon Public Works Director Pat Barnes ticked off a list of pleasure craft that washed up on the town’s bayfront during last week’s rains and winds: one 35-foot wooden power boat, three 30-foot fiberglass sailboats, a 15-foot runabout and a 30-foot fiberglass power boat.
“We picked up another 10 yards of debris scattered along the shoreline,” he said. “And that’s just in one week. There have been heavier winds this year, so there’s a lot more junk this year than last.”
But nothing this time has been as downright scary as the life-size Halloween skeleton a public works employee once spied bobbing offshore.
“I’m just glad we found it before other people did,” Barnes said.
After last week’s storms, Peter Ruppert of the Belvedere Lagoon Property Owners Association looked like he was having a surf shop yard sale, one Belvedere resident noted after seeing a list of wind-blown watercraft he posted on the Belvedere Nextdoor social media site. He was hoping to find the owners of four kayaks, a canoe, seven paddle boards and a number of outdoor chairs and small fences that he plucked out of the lagoon.
“It’s debris that people lost off the back of their decks,” he said, recalling an inflatable raft that high winds once threw over the roof of someone’s house. “A lot of stuff gets blown into the water.”
