ALPENA — A group of volunteers took on the task of removing waste and debris from Blair Street Park in Alpena this year, and Jeff Welch, who leads the cleanup effort, says that more work is needed to spruce up the shores at Alpena’s local parks.

Welch said that more than 57,000 pounds of material was removed from the beach in 2025.

On Monday, Welch shared with The News results from beach cleanup efforts this year, which he helped coordinate with volunteers from the community.

Welch said that cleanup efforts this year were concentrated at Blair Street Park, near the pier. He stated in an email that volunteers removed 57,000 pounds of sludge, bark, and other pollutants from the beach with 120 hours of labor from volunteers.

To compare, Welch said that volunteers removed 50,000 pounds of material from beaches in 2024.

“We were limited to just Blair beach simply because of the high volume of debris at Blair and a finite amount of volunteer labor,” Welch explained. “We need more volunteers which will be the focus of a spring recruiting campaign.”

Welch said this coming year, he will need more volunteers to meet the needs of Mich-e-ke-wis, Blair, and Bay View beaches.

“We need a lot of volunteers moving forward,” Welch said. “It’s nobody’s fault. We just need to do things better and smarter.”

He also said that he hopes to bring more public awareness to the issue of waste in the community and educate the public on how their trash can end up in Lake Huron. Welch said that himself and his group of volunteers picked up “thousands of cigarette butts” this summer.

“It’s not fun work,” he added. “We’ve got to put an end to this.”

Welch lives along Lake Huron in Alpena and described an encounter he had with a family who he assumed were visiting from Ohio, because of their Ohio license plates. He said that he heard the children express disgust at the sludge that they could see from the Blair Street Pier.

“When those people got back to Ohio, they were telling their friends what they saw in Alpena,” Welch added.

Welch explained that the majority of the sludge came from the storm runoff pipe from under the Blair Street Pier. He said that the sludge is made up of debris.

“The sludge is loaded with rubber, cigarette butts, grass clippings, and leaves,” he said. “I suspect the sludge itself is full of salt, metals, grease, oil, and brake material from autos.”

Welch added that on June 15, volunteers had a large cleanup project, as there was an “initial storm-water purge.”

He explained that the sludge, which was removed during this cleanup event, was approximately 18 inches deep on the beach.

“We collected 15,000 pounds on the first cleanup,” he added.

Welch stated that the sludge material is carried away from the beach during periods of on-shore waves. The sludge returns with the surf during periods of off-shore winds when surface water is carried out to sea and is replaced with water returning on the bottom surf. It is this returning lower-level of water that returns debris to the beaches.

Welch said that because of “extreme low-water levels this summer” on Lake Huron, there was brown bark washing up on shore, whereas in 2024, the bark that washed up was black in color.

He explained that brown bark indicates that the organic material hadn’t oxidized. In other words, he said that the material hadn’t been opposed to oxygen for “any period of time.”

“Because of low water levels, the surf is now picking up bark from further off-shore and depositing it on the beaches,” Welch added. “Bark that would have remained hidden if not for the low-water level. This brown bark has been submerged since the lumbering era. The brown bark is not part of the black bark that has ebbed and flowed with wave action for the past 125 plus years.”

According to Welch, all of the debris collected from these beach cleanup efforts are dumped at the city compost pile and are then recycled into dirt.

Kayla Wikaryasz can be reached at 989-358-5688 or kwikaryasz@TheAlpenaNews.com.