Dirty Job: Cleaning Up Clearwater Beach

It seems odd to place the words “work” and “beach” together in the same sentence.

After all, the jewel of Clearwater, its beach, is a place for time off the clock, not on it. But for a small team of employees, their office is the beach and their job is to keep it clean.

The early morning hours on Clearwater Beach are reserved for a pre-work jog or maybe a roll of the dice for a retiree and his metal detector.

They see the mess left the previous day, the discarded juice boxes and empty bags of chips, the cigarette butts and suntan lotion bottles. They see the sometimes overflowing garbage cans. 

What they also see are two John Deere tractors pulling an odd-looking device up and down the 3½ mile expanse of beach. They’re called Barber Beach Rakes. They are to the beach what a Zamboni is to an ice rink. Metal teeth of sorts stick out from a conveyor belt and rotate around as the rake is pulled along the beach. Garbage, big and small, is collected and pushed into a storage bin at the back of the $42,000 rake.

The operators arrive at their sandy office each day at 5 a.m. They pilot the $32,000 tractors and erase the messes left by beachy litterbugs. Instead of a hand-drawn picture pinned to a cubicle wall or a requisite framed photo of their wives on their desks, these guys get to stare out at the Gulf of Mexico and an almost endless waterfront from their air-conditioned mobile office.

What could be better than collecting a paycheck for that, right?

“Dirty diapers are the worst,” supervisor Chris Cruickshank said.

That’s right. Dirty diapers. It’s pretty gross and more common than anyone would imagine. Unfortunately for the four city employees whose duty is to keep Clearwater’s gem sparkly, their breathtaking backdrop could easily land them on an episode of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.

“The rakes can’t get behind the dunes or along walls, so they have to pick all that stuff up by hand,” Cruickshank said.

And diapers aren’t the only unpleasant find. These workers are usually the ones to find washed-up sea life.

Each year, the crew finds all sorts of dead animals, including dolphins and sea turtles. A freshly lit sky and crashing surf aren’t quite so appealing when you find Flipper washed up on shore.

It is a dirty job in a lovely office, two more things that don’t seem to pair well. It’s absolutely crucial, though.

“If we didn’t keep up with cleaning the beach every day, it would get bad,” manager Bob Barry said. “No one would want to come to the beach if we didn’t do this.”

Efforts to keep the beach from accumulating too many dirty diapers and other pieces of garbage isn’t cheap, either. Between the salt water and the fine, sugar-white sand that cakes the bearings, the two rakes see regular maintenance. The collected garbage also has to be taken to the county dump. And then there are the events to keep Barry and Cruickshank on their toes.

“We have to be proactive with events,” Cruickshank said. 

The day after the beach was flooded with people celebrating Independence Day, it was left a mess, but not as much of a mess as it could have been. Certain measures were taken to reduce the impact of added traffic on the beach. Instead of collecting trash from the 123 garbage cans just once at the end of the day, this team made plans to add a pickup.

“Even people with good intentions can’t help leaving behind trash if a can is overflowing,” Cruickshank said.

Even with the added measures, discarded fireworks boxes still could be found waiting to be swept away along with the usual soda bottles and deflated beach balls, some of them nowhere near a garbage can. 

The need for a beach cleanup crew won’t go away as long as there is a beach to clean up (Barry points out that the beach isn't going anywhere thanks to a jetty that has widened the beach over time). 

Nevertheless, next time that three-point shot bounces off the rim of the garbage can, it might be a good idea to go back and pick it up. 

Especially if it’s a diaper.