The trash piling up under the JFK Bridge on Padre Island is bad enough that a bag can be filled in just five minutes — and a group of local students is stepping up to do something about it Saturday.
Flour Bluff Elementary's Ocean's Club is teaming up with Over the Bridge Future Fishers and the Sea Pines Beach Cleanup Crew for a coast-wide Adopt-A-Beach cleanup along the Texas coast. The event runs from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and anyone can attend.
Elizabeth Neckert, a fourth grader at Flour Bluff Elementary and member of the Ocean's Club, lives close enough to the water that she can hear it from her street.
"You can actually sort of hear the ocean, um, like, from my street, but it's just, you can very faintly hear it, and it's so relaxing," Neckert said.
But Neckert says that same ocean poses serious dangers to the animals that live in it — particularly sea turtles.
"Plastic bags and the sea turtles, they eat jellyfish and whenever the plastic bags go into the ocean since they're filled up with air they they move just like a jellyfish," Neckert said.
Shauna Moyer, a fourth grade teacher at Flour Bluff Elementary who leads the Ocean's Club, says the cleanup is personal for her students.
"This is where they fish, where they play, where they grow up in, and if they don't take care of it, then who is going to take care of it?" Moyer said.
Moyer says the trash doesn't stay put once it accumulates under the bridge.
"The trash is coming from the ocean to the Laguna Madre through our currents... which is part of our estuaries where the baby fish and the baby birds are... making it really dangerous for those baby fish and baby birds," Moyer said.
Laurie Lyng organized the Sea Pines Beach Cleanup Crew in 2022 and says Saturday's effort is about more than a single cleanup.
"This is important for our whole community to come together because it really shows that when we all pitch in a little bit we can make a real difference," Lyng said.
Lyng says a key part of the mission is instilling values that last beyond any one event.
"Maybe the adults who are causing this trash, they were never taught the values of why we should keep our environment and our waterways clean. So we're hoping that we can do that now with our groups and instilling those values onto the kids in these groups," Lyng said.
The real question, organizers say, isn't whether the area will be clean Saturday — it's whether it will stay that way.
The cleanup runs from 8 a.m. to noon Saturday and is for everyone under the JFK Bridge on Padre Island.
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