Brian Vest, founder and president of the Conch Republic Marine Army, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about the organization.
The Conch Republic Marine Army is a 501c3 nonprofit organization.
Vest explained it “was started after Hurricane Irma came through the Keys in 2017, and particularly here in Big Pine where I live, it was pretty leveled. I think the final totals were somewhere between 2000 and 3000 homes were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. But those homes didn’t disappear. What was left to those homes was pushed to the streets, so we had trash piled up to the power lines, but the rest of the homes, everything else that’s in them, including televisions, refrigerators, sofas, got shoved into the water and that just kind of floated around forever and while we’re trying to rebuild here in the middle part here in Big Pine, people got a little frustrated with how things were moving. So one day, I made a social media post that I was going to try and clean up a sofa and a porta potty and a hot tub and a few other things in the canal of our neighborhood, and 25 people showed up. Somehow, a little cold beverage arrived, and it was just great way to take your mind off of the severity of trying to recover from a hurricane. Everyone had a great time. They said, let’s do it again. So I made another post, and the second time, I had 125 people show up, and even more cold beverages. We had another great day. And everyone said this is a great way to release some energy and frustration. People got connected to the people they needed. So they were framers and roofers and sheet rockers and electricians and churches and it just got to be a community of, hey, let’s all help each other. They said, let’s do it again. So I made one more post, but that time, I asked, please, please respond with, if you’re coming, bring a kayak. You’ve got to bring something floaty, chairs, paddle boards, and we’re just going to jump in these canals and clean up all the trash that’s snagged in all the mangroves. And 250 people showed up, including the sheriff’s office came because they had heard about traffic problems A couple of cranes arrived, an ambulance arrived, just in case anyone got overheated. A bunch of churches showed up and walked door to door because we had massive amounts of suicide that people don’t remember, especially here on Big Pine, getting upwards of almost 30 I think. After that, a couple of people came and they said, man, if you could keep this going, we could probably clean this place up. I agreed that I’ll try and get it going. Everyone promised me money was easy. People are hard to get together, and quite the opposite, people are amazing and very easy to attract to something like this, because it’s a lot of fun to do what we do, and the money is just impossible. There’s no state, federal or even a local budget for hurricane disaster recovery on this issue. Now, people take care of people. So you got housing and roofs, and then you got pets and you got food, and then the environment is last. Unfortunately, all the paint cans that people are keeping today in their garages, and everyone has them, spray paint cans and WD 40, get rid of that stuff before a hurricane comes, because it floats out there and then it rusts and busts and kills just godly miles of shoreline. So that was seven years ago and here we are today, at a at a whole new level, trying to tackle the whole problem Keys wide.”
The Conch Republic Marine Army had more than 5,500 volunteers taking part in weekly trips out to collect almost 550,000 pounds of debris.
Vest said, “If people don’t understand what a ton truly weighs, I think one of my analogies that an entire tractor trailer of Coca Cola bottles without the Coca Cola in them weighs one ton. So you have 275 tractor trailers of plastic out there that we’ve pulled out by hand. But that also includes 101 refrigerators that we found in the back country. So it’s not just unusual things. It’s usual stuff, the normal trash that floats in. But more importantly, that number comes from about 55 to 60 miles of shoreline that we have done incredibly well. There are 900 miles in the Keys, so we haven’t even scratched at 10%. My guess is there’s thousands of tons out there to go get.”
Does this kind of effort happen elsewhere?
Vest said, “It does happen. One of the things that differentiate us from say, a beach cleanup, is that we don’t do anything you can get to by land. So if you can drive to the beach and clean it up, that is not what we do. We are trying to tackle the offshore islands that you can only get to by boat, or places that there’s roads to them, so you’ve got to take a boat around the corner. There is one giant charity that runs the Mississippi River. They’re a great mentor of mine. They helped me get the concept started of putting boats in the water and getting people we call them Trash Team Six instead of Seal Team Six. But the idea they have a nice, stable, flat, comfortable boat that can haul people and trash. We go 10 miles into the back country and we grab a bunch of trash for an hour or two, have lunch, hit a sandbar, to rinse off and come back in. That was already created by the Mississippi River group called Living Lands and Waters. Then there’s the Cajun Navy responds in hurricanes, and there’s been certainly cleanup groups in the Keys and in Florida, but we’re trying to do this on an industrial scale and because the challenge is so big, I certainly bit off more than I thought I could chew, but apparently I can chew through it, but it is a huge problem, and all the trash is right here because the Keys are very tiny and the hurricane just flattened us. As we all know here in the Keys, the reef is in trouble. We all know the grass flats are shrinking and the mangroves are in deep trouble. So we have a three legged stool there that all three components are in trouble, and so that’s going to decline in water quality, which we all see almost every day.”
There are weekly volunteer trips out of two locations, starting with Marathon on Wednesdays and Saturdays and a second boat goes out of Stock Island Key West on Saturdays.
Vest said, “The trip going out is completely free. We’re not funded by any state or local budgets, but corporate donations and personal donations allow us to take people out for free who don’t either have access to the water or are tourists looking for a unique way to get out there. In Marathon, that boat runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and then in Stock Island, it runs on Saturdays, but we’re trying to raise enough to start a weekday trip as well. So it’d be nice to have two boats going twice a week, and the amount of trash they could get is quite a bit. The entire aggregate of what we’ve gotten is enough to stretch from Key West to Atlanta, if you tied it all end to end and that’s trap line from commercial fishing gear that gets busted off in hurricanes and storms and lost by people driving over with propellers on boats, but all that stuff also comes from the Caribbean too. So it’s not just the Keys. It’s everywhere, and it’s completely free. You get a nice hour boat ride. It’s very comfortable. We can go in almost every weather condition out there, because there’s always somewhere to hide behind an island, do a little bit of work standing in the water about up to your knees, maybe your waist. Sometimes we give you scissors and bags, and we’ve got water on board, and the Key West boat has lunch for free, provided by Winn Dixie. Then after you clean for an hour, the boat is completely full of trash, and you can’t take anymore, and we make sure we bring the passengers home, and you hit a sandbar, rinse off, and you make some friends like you have never met before, because these are people from all over the world who are either in the hotel, or locals or just tourists looking for a different way to do something. Then you come back to the dock, we weigh it all, we get a nice picture, and we put it on our Facebook page and social media, and then we wash, rinse and do it again.”
A number of organizations also help, including Sheriff Rick Ramsay.
Vest said, “Monroe County Solid Waste Management team is amazing. They send a truck out to every location when we finish and pick it up right away. The sheriff’s office has donated two trucks to us over the years. The last one is now finally rusted out and died, so we’re in need of another one. But yeah, having him battle graffiti and litter on land and us in the water, there’s a sense, and I agree with him completely, that litter begets more litter. If you see a trashed corner, you really don’t care about it because there’s trash everywhere. But if it’s clean and you see a piece of trash, it kind of stands out. I have seen people stop and turn left and go pick something up that doesn’t belong there, just because it shouldn’t be there. It’s the only piece there. So I think there’s a Keys wide movement to stop littering and remove litter. Every boater I meet, says they go out fishing, whatever, and they’ll turn the boat and pick up a pool noodle that’s floating out there or something. They all fill up a bag. They can help that way too.”
The Conch Republic Marine Army really is a grassroots effort.
Vest said, “The expense of these boats is about $150,000 a year to run them. Just insurance alone, each boat is $12,000 to protect everyone. So that’s $24,000 a year just for the two boats. Then we have captains. We pay a very fair and reasonable wage so that they can be employed with us and with other jobs that they have, and not take a hit, because it’s expensive to live here in the Keys. So we’re in the $450,000 a year cost to the Keys, and that’s raised so far by corporate and individual donations. But $450,000 sounds like a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a drop in the bucket. Our goal is to put ourselves out of a job. I don’t want to do this forever. This is not my goal. I’d like to clean up one time and it’s never been done. We’re cleaning up stuff that’s 50 years old, that’s out there. Though it can be done.”
The efforts really can be life changing.
Vest said, “Once someone gets out on the boat with us and goes through just one day, they will come out a changed person, and then they will be passionate about our Florida Keys and water they already are, or they think they are. But you cannot come away from a day of hanging out with some great people and doing some great work, and coming home feeling more satisfied than you can imagine. Then, not only do you want to do it again because there is some addiction to it, because you want to do it again, it’s free. So it makes it nice for people who do not have access to boats. There’s a lot of us here in the Keys that don’t. I, for one, don’t have a boat, even though we run two of them. So if you’ve got a family, kids under eight is a little challenging. So anyone above eight years old, if you’re a family, you can go to our website, and it’s easy to sign up. It’s free. You just purchase a ticket for $0 and you pick a date, and you’re on the boat, and all the instructions are right there on what to expect. It’s real simple to join. The bigger we get, the more complicated it gets. So I cannot do all the things myself with my wife. So what we have now is the President who lives in Key West of the CRMA. He’s very involved. He became a member of the board of directors, and then I asked him to personally take on some of the challenges that I have, and he agreed and he’s there in Key West, and he will meet business owners. We’ve got some nice meetings coming up from the presentation I just gave with you at the Rotary, business owners who want to get involved and share some of the profits of a drink or a tip line, or any small ways to raise money that can help us keep Key West going, because Key West is our next biggest challenge. There’s so much trash down there, it’s incredible. It’s easily a year and a half if we go two days a week, and we really just don’t want to leave it out there for that long. Let’s just go get it done.”
The cleanups are really fun.
Vest said, “The biggest thing that I hear is people are a little nervous about going like, what’s involved? How rough is the boat ride? Am I going to get seasick? Is it dangerous? The answer is, it’s fun. We have 80 year olds who go on using a walker and get on the boat, and they just help pass out water. So from eight years old to 80 years old. You’ve got to be fairly physically fit. You’ve got to get in and out of the boat. So if you’re that challenged, you might want to sit in the boat and help sort trash, but you can still go and still be a part of it. There’s nothing like having a bunch of smiles and some music and some friendship going on out there to help save the Keys. It’s a lot of fun.”
For more information, click here: https://www.conchrepublicmarinearmy.org/