DATE: Sunday, June 15, 1997                 TAG: 9706150050

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

AT ANNUAL BAY CLEANUP, EVEN DIVERS JUMP IN 3,800 VOLUNTEERS CLEAR ABOUT 80 TONS OF TRASH

A fleet of divers volunteered with a shore-cleaning army Saturday, giving the waterways and beaches of the Chesapeake Bay the deepest scouring yet in the nine-year history of Clean the Bay Day.

The annual cleanup began in 1989 when Robert K. Dean, a Virginia Beach environmentalist, rounded up $500 and 2,000 volunteers to tidy up 50 miles of shoreline.

The program has grown. On Saturday, more than 3,800 volunteers, many of them from the Navy, civic leagues and environmental organizations, cleaned up about 80 tons of trash for the regionwide effort among Bayfront communities, organizers said. The clean-up this year expanded to Portsmouth and Franklin.

Seventy-two divers fished junk from the waterways surrounding the Bay. Some dove off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel itself, and other scuba-laden aquanauts braved less-choppy rivers, lakes and streams.

When the day was done, thousands of pounds of trash were cleared from more than 200 miles of coastline in and around Hampton Roads.

At Pleasure House Lake, which touches the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Stephanie Bussiere, 43, and her children, Miranda, 15, and Michael, 12, spent their morning stuffing waste into yellow plastic bags.

The family recently moved from New Hampshire. At their new home, she could do without litter at the neighborhood lake. So they volunteered, part of a collection of neighborhood workers at that site.

``And there's divers out there,'' Bussiere said. ``I'd like to see what they pull out.''

Divers Bruce Abbott, 33, and Troy Lindsey, 37, located a black, rusty Yamaha motorcycle.

A Virginia Beach police wrecker carried the surfaced chopper away.

``It's amazing for such a little, tiny lake how much stuff comes out of here,'' Kelly Turner said as she watched the divers brave the murky waters of Pleasure House Lake.

Turner, a 35-year-old Virginia Beach teacher, was participating in her third Clean the Bay campaign. Last year, she said, the lake yielded a chair, a pay telephone, and a dead giant sea turtle.

This year, near a shore where a half-decomposed bagel floated with a paper cup, a can of Bud Dry, a Farm Fresh bread bag and a canister of paint, the motorcycle took the cake.

Abbott, a volunteer firefighter, and Lindsey, a search and rescue diver with the Chesapeake Police Department, were not so surprised by the motorcycle. They've seen it before.

In fact, diver Cam Neimeyer said, underwater pollution is a huge problem along the Chesapeake.

``It's just incredible the amount of stuff you see underwater,'' said Neimeyer, a 42-year-old Virginia Beach native. ``There are a lot of people who think the water is their garbage can. . . . There's garbage and fishing line everywhere you can see. I'd like to come back to a place and see it the same way it was 10 years ago.''

At the Clean the Bay command center - a collection of deck chairs and tables holding cellular phones and tubes of tanning lotion on the pier behind a cafe at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base - Robert Dean said that by getting families involved, the grass-roots cleanup aims to be a moot movement somewhere down the road.

``We're trying to be proactive rather than reactive,'' Dean said. ``The matter is you're setting societal changes here. If you develop good habits with young people, then they're going to bring them forward. We want this project to eventually go away.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

IAN MARTIN/The Virginian-Pilot

Mike Johnson, left, of the Chesapeake police Underwater Search and

Rescue Team, and Robert Parker of Virginia Beach, volunteered at

Pleasure House Lake, at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

in Virginia Beach.

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