While most of the island was marinating meat and buying bags of ice for Super Bowl gatherings, Ciera Obando and her family were on the beach picking up the mess from someone’s illegal partying.
“It’s such a nice spot. I used to come here all the time when I was growing up. But this is crazy,” she said.
She hadn’t been to the beach in a while, but last month she brought her 4-year-old son to enjoy the ocean. What she saw was dramatic: hundreds of nails and staples and charred bits of wood scattered in the sand.
The spot fronting two empty house lots along Kahala Avenue near Hunakai Street has become a favorite for nighttime bonfire parties — which are illegal. The favored material for making the illegal bonfires is wooden pallets. Each pallet can have close to 80 nails and staples, and those end up buried in the sand. The nails rust down to thin, needle-size points.
On Sunday morning Ciera and her mother, Chris, wore thick gloves and used plastic kitchen colanders to sift through the sand. Her father, Marcelo, searched along the waterline using a construction tool that looks like a Swiffer with a magnet on the end. Every few minutes he’d come back to the collection bucket with another handful of metal he had pulled up from the wet sand.
They weighed their haul on a luggage scale. In three hours they picked up 5 pounds of nails along 50 feet of beach.
“No matter how many times you comb an area, you can always find more nails,” Ciera said.
Several factors make the area a perfect spot: Because the house lots are empty, there’s nobody nearby to see the flames and call the cops. Bonfires are big with the younger set who see the glowing images on social media and want to create those magical photos of their own. The pallets are easy to obtain; many businesses offer them as “free wood” rather than pay for disposal.
“I’ve been told that social media describes this beach as a great place to party. I’ve seen almost everything, and I mean everything,” said Tim Gerner, who lives nearby and is part of the cleanup effort.
On the beach, Chris Obando kept digging down, 2 feet, 3 feet. She never reached a point where there weren’t nails.
“People make a fire and then think, ‘Oh, I’m covering it up so nobody will get hurt,’” she said.
Ciera joined 808Cleanup, a statewide volunteer network, and posted on their website to invite others to join her efforts. “One man was walking on the beach last week, and he saw what we were doing. He went out to his car and ripped out the magnet from his speaker so he could help pick up nails.”
She’s been out there for the last several weekends and has kept track of the nails: 20 pounds so far.
“It would be great if we could come here one week and it wasn’t like this,” she said.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
