Heal the Bay

              My name is Jose Rea. I am currently enrolled in English 2030 with professor Hernandez. On September 17, 2016, I participated in Heal the Bay event in Santa Monica Beach. I had to wake up earlier than usual since the event started at 9am. I had to wake up a few hours before that to try an avoid traffic.  Apparently not many people go to the beach that early, so I had to wait there for like an hour and a half. When it finally did start we got into small groups, went through all the procedures on what to look out for. We then got materials such as buckets gloves and for some people, sunscreen. It is surprising to see how many people smoke at the beach and do not properly throw away their cigarette buds. Our group in total collected around 105 cigarette buds in an hour. Besides all the buds, there were many little plastic pieces that the birds might confused it for food. The beach is dirtier than you might imagine, you really have to pay close attention to see how much trash there is on the beach.  In the end it was a great experience to help clean the beach, but it is sad to see that people cannot help clean up after themselves and help protect the earth by keeping it clean.