San Angelo's Lakeshores Littered From Fourth of July Revelry

Heaps of garbage and carelessly discarded refuse littered the sandy and grassy areas of Lake Nasworthy on Sunday morning, remnants of hundreds of fourth of July revelers, who left the lake in a state of complete waste not far from resembling a landfill.

Plastic bits of flotation devices, beer cans, glass bottles, cartons from booze and pizza boxes and the carcasses of spent fireworks shells lay strewn about Mary E. Lee Beach and The Horseshoe, cast aside apart from somewhat organized heaps stacked next to overflowing trash bins.

Two workers for the city showed up at approximately 7:30 a.m. to start cleaning up the parks, beginning with the mounds of trash strewn about Mary E. Lee Beach.

“It’ll take us till—here, a couple of hours and then we still have to jump over to the other park, but here is going to take us at least four or five hours,” one of them said, glancing at the three to four bags they’d already thrown into the trailer. “Some of them do put it in bags, but the careless people just drop it on the ground when there’s a trash can right there. They just don’t even care.”

While each designated trash barrel was overflowing and some had made the effort to stack their garbage in bags next to the receptacles, the entire beach was littered with small bits of paper, plastic and aluminum trash, much of it only a few feet or yards from a sack or bin.

“It’s lots and lots of bottles. Bottles are prohibited, but people don’t really care and they bring them anyway, so the majority is beer bottles,” the worker said. Then, looking down the long beach from their position at one still litter-covered end, “It’s kind of a little overwhelming, but oh well, what can you do? All of this is going to take us a whole trailer.”

While the beach was being worked on, a lone fisherman walked around The Horseshoe, eyeballing the green landscape that was grossly marred by large and bulky bits of blue beer boxes, cans and other waste.

“I never fished in here,” the man said, looking down the shoreline. “I like to fish, but golly, look at all this crap.”

The fisherman said he wasn’t surprised to see the strewn bits of litter. And pondered whether it would ever change.

“I don’t know, I guess that’s the way people celebrate the fourth now. Get somebody else to clean up the mess.”

Despite a very busy weekend for the police department’s lake division officers, no major incidents were reported and crowds were kept under control.