A Day in the Life of a Beach Cleanup Worker
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It's the kind of morning poets dream of; another glorious sunrise over the beach at Gulf Shores State Park.
But it's not the way the sun breaks over the horizon that has Stan Nassar and Rebecca Brescia out here on this morning. In fact, Nassar and Brescia hardly notice the brilliant sun rise taking place just ahead of them. They're too focused on the beach itself, scanning for any objects that don’t belong.
As part of BP’s ongoing commitment to the Gulf Coast, Brescia and Nassar are members of the locally-based and specially trained maintenance and monitoring reconnaissance teams that patrol the Alabama shorelines daily, looking for signs of submerged residue balls. The two have been trained to investigate and cleanup anything appearing in the sand that resembles residual MC252 oil.
For Brescia, a local resident, and Nassar, a life-long visitor to Alabama’s Gulf Coast, there is a strong sense of pride for the work at hand.
“I would be one of the one’s that would be out here cleaning it up if no one else would,” says Nassar, who has been assisting with the clean-up for almost a year.
Nassar's day begins long before the sun rises over Alabama’s beaches. By 3 a.m., he is on the road, making the 42 mile drive from Bay Minette down Highway 59 to the coast.
Both Brescia and her husband, Ross Freeman, share a similar commitment to the beach and the Alabama gulf coast community. “A lot of people depend on the beach,” says Brescia, who has been part of the cleanup for the last seven months. They both work on the crews assigned to clean the Gulf State Park; Brescia as a beach walker and Freeman as a sandman operator.
At 4:30 a.m., Nassar, Brescia and Freeman check in at a local staging site, where all cleanup crews meet before being deployed to the beaches. Once inside, crew members greet each other cheerfully, and begin sharing stories of the day over a pot of hot coffee, while waiting patiently for their respective foreman to announce departure.
At 5:11 a.m., the crews load up in vans to begin the caravan to the coast. Today, three vans are headed to the Gulf State Park, while the remaining teams are deployed to the Fort Morgan area. The twenty-minute ride is quiet - some looking out the window, some trying to catch a few more precious minutes of sleep.
Teams arrive at the State Park operations site, where one immediately notices the meticulous attention to detail evident all around the work site as vans, UTVs, and tractors are lined up in a row against the surrounding fence.
At 5:49 a.m., the crews gather for the morning safety meeting. Today, the supervisors remind crews about the importance of stretching and proper sleeping habits to prevent fatigue. Workers are reminded to always be aware of their surroundings to avoid injury.
At the conclusion of the safety meeting, crews move briskly to the beach where they will divide - half heading towards the west side of the state pier and half towards the east side.
Over the course of the next four hours, crews perform visual site inspections as they walk along the shoreline. As the waves roll in beside them and occasionally over their boots, the workers scan nearly fours miles of shoreline on this shift. The workers comb over the sand with nets in hand, investigating and cleaning any material that looks like oil.
“When you’ve been doing this for so long, you develop an eye for what the oil looks like,” Nassar says.
While the crews scour the beach throughout the morning, they chat amongst themselves about their families and their lives away from the beach. They ask because they care.
“We hang out outside of work,” Brescia says. “It’s like a family, you know?”
This is a close knit group, which shares common interests and values, including the seriousness of the job.
“I feel everyone out here now genuinely cares about the beach and about what they do,” Brescia says.
“My family has been coming here for 50 years,” says Nassar.
The crew finishes trekking along the shoreline and dumps the contents of their nets into buckets on the beds of UTVs. Nets are stacked carefully beside the buckets.
By 10 a.m., crews begin to wrap up operations for the day. Workers pile into vans to return to the morning staging site. As the crews arrive, they are greeted by the warm aroma of today’s lunch – pizza. As the last slice of pepperoni is polished off, many workers head home to get some rest, while others head on to second jobs.
“After work, I’ll probably help my daughter move out,” Nassar says. “But nothing really, 2:30 comes real early.”
For Nassar, Brescia, and Freeman, they’ll be back in the morning; back to patrolling Alabama’s shoreline; back to keeping the beaches clean.
For more information on maintenance and monitoring, click here.
