A team of roughly 30 coworkers dressed in bright green shirts swarmed San Luis Obispo Creek for a community cleaning day/teambuilding exercise on June 29. They removed hundreds of pounds of garbage, old mattresses, tires, barbecues, and a dirty but fairly new MacBook that police said was listed as stolen.
One of the workers told New Times that they left active homeless encampments alone and only took items that were overgrown with weeds and clearly abandoned.
“We’re not going to take anybody’s stuff,” Andrew Robillard said.
The cleanup was organized by the local office of Aviation Consultants, Inc., which rounded up its pilots, dispatchers, mechanics, and customer service reps into teams of four or five. The teams that pulled the most trash from any of seven locations were eligible for cash prizes at the company’s after-party.
ACI spokesperson Crystal Heavers said the company found so much trash and so many large items that they had to trade in their pickup truck for a giant moving van in order to take everything to
the dump.
Sifting through the creekside refuse gave the workers a first-hand look at how many homeless people have to live.
“We found some school supplies, which is kind of sad,” Heidi Stets said.
Another team found a pregnancy test, but it was negative.
“We hoped that this would inspire other people to do the same kind of thing,” Heavers said. “A few random people actually joined us.”
This article appears in Jul 5-12, 2012.