A floating bar and 10 tons of trash bury Virginia Beach after holiday, officials say
There was a heck of a party at Virginia Beach, Virginia, over the Memorial Day weekend and the popular tourist town had the piles of trash to prove it.
At least 10 tons of trash was found strewn across an area known as Chic’s Beach Monday morning, WAVY reported.
“I was disappointed to wake up this morning to see images of trash all over our beautiful Chesapeake Bay beach after Sunday’s festivities,” posted town council member Councilman Michael Berlucchi on Facebook. “We can do better than this!”
Video of the trashed beaches has been shared thousands of times on Facebook in the past day, and covered by media outlets across the country. The trash is being blamed on an annual Memorial Day weekend event called Floatopia, which invites revelers to bring floatation devices to the beach, according to WTKR.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous the condition they left the beach in,” Sam Seal of Courtland, Virginia, posted on the Floatopia Facebook page Monday. “People of VB and pretty much any tourist destination or otherwise always wonder why we can’t have fun events without all the hassle. This is why.”
“I hope the community does everything in their power to block this event from ever going on there again,” Michael Sharpe wrote on the Facebook page.
A video of the trashed beach first appeared online early Monday. It was recorded by Melissa Noel. It shows countless floatation devices left behind by the crowds, along with towels, bottles, red Solo cups, clothing and something she identified as “a floating bar.” There are also piles of trash-filled plastic bags, mounded around outnumbered trash cans.
“Wow, stay classy Virginia Beach,” she says at one point.
The video, which is just over a minute, has been seen 1.1 million times, shared 14,000 times and inspired 2,700 comments as of Tuesday morning.
Noel, a Virginia Beach resident, told WTKR that she was “disgusted.” “I had never seen the beach look like that before,” she told the station.
Drew Lankford, with the Virginia Beach Public Works Department, told WAVY it took his crew and volunteers about two and a half hours to remove the trash. His crews usually pick up only about a ton of trash on that beach after the typical spring weekend, the station reported.
Lankford said, “one of the head guys who puts on the party (Floatopia) was out here,” helping to cleanup, according to WAVY.