PACIFIC COUNTY, Wash. -- Coastal businesses love seeing the droves of visitors a holiday weekend can bring. But last year’s Fourth of July crowd was too much for Ocean Park art gallery owner Bette Lu Krause to handle.
“It was so loud and crowded. A lot of drunken behavior and mayhem,” Krause said. “I mean we even have an unsolved homicide.”
An estimated 100,000 visitors spent 2015’s July Fourth on the Long Beach Peninsula.
According to volunteers who clean up the beach, the tourists left as many as 37 tons of trash behind.
“A lot of people have brought old furniture down to the beach to sit around in ... and now we have the old furniture,” said Pacific County resident Bonnie Lou Cozby.
She said law enforcement was overwhelmed by the crowds and unable to enforce laws, which ban overnight camping on the beach or in the dunes.
After helping clean up the trash in 2015, Cozby created a Facebook group called, “Not a ban. A better plan.”
She and other volunteers, with help from Washington State Parks, created signs, banners and flyers going up on the peninsula ahead of the holiday weekend informing people of the laws banning overnight camping on the beach.
In addition to the signs, there will be a beefed up law enforcement presence on the peninsula this July Fourth.
The number of state park rangers is expected to double, more Pacific County deputies will be assigned to the Long Beach and Ocean Park area, and the city of Long Beach hired three additional police officers to work the holiday weekend.
Cozby knows it won’t be a completely peaceful Fourth of July, but she expects the changes she helped bring about will make a difference this weekend and hopefully in the long run.
“I expect it to be better, but I also understand we didn’t get to this point in one year’s time,” said Cozby.
