Cajun Fest cleanup spearheaded by Scouts
By Miguel Morales miguel@theacorn.com

Bright and early on Memorial Day, local Boy Scouts from troops 618 and 622 and their parents were picking up what remained from the weekend's Cajun Creole Music Festival held at Rancho Santa Susana Community Park.

Marshal Shrago, the festival's head of operations for the last decade, said this year's cleanup was a first for many of the crew of volunteers and Boy Scouts.

"You haven't lived until you pull out a trash bag full of hot crawfish and it spills all over the place," Shrago joked.

Teams of Scouts, armed with "trash grabbers" bought especially for the job, walked along the park, the Metrolink Station, Simi Valley High School and the Albertsons parking lot from 8 a.m. until almost noon gathering what more than 10,000 festival attendees left behind.

Meanwhile, members of the Simi Sunrise Rotary Club, which sponsors the annual event, drove around in carts picking up garbage cans filled to the rim and carrying off the hundreds of pounds of trash collected over the holiday weekend.

Before it was over, the Scouts had logged nearly 250 volunteer hours from the cleanup and the festival and had filled to capacity four large rolloff dumpsters, donated by Waste Management Inc., Shrago said.

"We want to make sure the park is in as good condition as we found it," Shrago said. "This year went fast, and we had everything picked up much quicker than we expected it."

Many of the Scouts were at Santa Susana Park throughout the weekend helping out. Daniel Glassman, 15, from troop 622, and his mother, Teri, spent Saturday at the festival- from the time the gates opened until well past the last dance- and came back Monday to get their hands dirty. The two have helped round up the trash that lines the parking lots since 2002.

"It's for a good cause," Teri Glassman said. "The Sunrise Rotary Club is so helpful to our troops, so we want to give them help whenever we can."

The mother-and-son team said they had to physically collect from the trash cans all the plates, cups and food that hadn't made it into the garbage bags.

And at the beginning of the day, when space in the dumpster was plentiful, trash could be easily disposed of, but as the container filled up, the pair would have to walk over old trash to dump what was newly collected, Teri Glassman said.

"It was smelly and gross, but the boys did a great job," she said.