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You never know what you’ll find on the beach the morning after Fourth

Mary Thompson, Tribune staff writer

Among the crushed beer cans, flimsy fast-food wrappers and broken and abandoned barbecues, a full-sized bedroom set glistened in South Shore’s morning sun Wednesday.

No one was napping in it because the whole mess – box spring and all – was hauled away by city maintenance crews just hours after the flash of fireworks brightened the night sky.

Trash has become Lake Tahoe’s memento of the Fourth of July celebration. Sometimes it can be an interesting, if not puzzling, job to clean it up.



“We usually find some weird things that have been left behind,” said South Lake Tahoe Parks Superintendent Steve Weiss. “But this year, the strangest was the bed set.”

The bed was left at Regan Beach, where city workers spent Wednesday morning collecting debris.



“There didn’t seem to be as many people down there this year and the mess didn’t seem to be as bad,” Weiss said. “We still picked up 30 yards of trash from there.”

Workers from the Clean Tahoe Program, a nonprofit organization that maintains public trash collection sites in South Lake Tahoe and El Dorado County, picked up 500 bags of garbage from the privately owned and operated Lakeside Beach, near the state line.

Program manager Stan Burton said Clean Tahoe tried a new approach to trash management on the beach’s busiest day of the summer.

“This was by far the easiest year in terms of clean up, mainly due to the cooperation of the Stateline Beach Homeowners Association who passed out garbage bags ahead of time,” Burton said. “The homeowners association had done the bulk of the work for us.”

Joanne Eisenbrandt, program assistant, said even though the crowds were lighter this year than in years past, when the holiday fell on a weekend day, the Clean Tahoe crews will be spending most of the week buffing out the area.

“Our goal is to have everything back to normal by the weekend,” she said.


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