YAKIMA — They were dropped from the sky, huge white trash bags weighing about 250 pounds each.
Early Wednesday, a helicopter began airlifting the bags filled with garbage and other debris left behind at abandoned campsites along the Yakima and Naches rivers and dropped them in an open area near Rotary Park just off 18th Street in Terrace Heights.
The bags would be trucked from there to the Terrace Heights landfill.
In all, 79 bags totaling more than 9 tons of garbage were pulled from several abandoned homeless camps along the rivers and on islands within the 13-mile stretch between Selah and Union Gap.
“This is an environmental cleanup,” said Yakima County Public Services Director Lisa Freund. “These are public properties. We have a public duty to clean them and make them environmentally safe.”
The work was part of an ongoing effort to clean up homeless encampments that for decades have dotted the rivers’ banks and areas of the Yakima Greenway, which features parks, lakes and a recreational pathway along the Yakima and Naches rivers.
Homeless people started building encampments there decades before the county adopted an ordinance in 2013 banning overnight camping along the river.
Makeshift wood structures, bicycle parts, clothing, mattresses, garbage and syringes are some of the typical debris left behind. For several years, service providers and the county have been working to clear the garbage from the area with little to no funding.
But that changed this summer, when the county received a $60,000 solid waste grant from the state Department of Ecology and a $10,000 grant from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The solid waste grant was a pass-through from the Yakima Health District, which determined that the debris was a health issue. And Fish and Wildlife says it impacts habitat.
Last spring, a lot of debris was swept into the rivers by high water.
Those who take up life along the riverbanks are the most chronically homeless people in the county. They are often reluctant to accept services.
County code enforcement officers have been going to camps, talking to those living there and offering to connect them to services, Freund said.
Code enforcement officers typically post cleanup notices at camps days before work begins, she said.
“They’re making continual sweeps through here,” Freund said.
The airlifted debris came from five abandoned camps in remote areas inaccessible by trucks, said Joel Freudenthal, water resource strategic manager for Yakima County.
“This is about the really remote stuff, whether the camps or active or not, and getting them out of there,” Freudenthal said. “You don’t want to have to build roads and stuff just to get this stuff out.”
County crews spent several weeks reaching those areas by foot and bagging up the garbage.
Using the helicopter was much more efficient than manually removing the garbage bags from those area, Freund said.
“In terms of cost effectiveness, it will be well under $10,000,” she said of the use of the helicopter. “We couldn’t get that efficiency with ground crews.”
But the work isn’t done. An estimated 30 camps remain throughout the area that still need to be cleaned up, Freund said.
“There’s still plenty out there,” she said. “A lot of this is on city jurisdiction but the county owns the property. You’ve got to be in lock-step to approach it.”
