MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
Volume 10 Issue 264
Santa Monica Daily Press SAMOHI TOPS RIVAL PALI SEE PAGE 3
We have you covered
THE FRESH AND CLEAN ISSUE
COMMUNITYPROFILES
DOUGLAS WOODHAMS
Kevin Herrera kevinh@smdp.com
WOODHAMS
Faith, family make the man BY KEVIN HERRERA Editor in Chief
DOWNTOWN Heading into the Taliban stronghold of Marjah with a quarter of his Afghan battalion high on hashish or opium was not how Douglas Woodhams, a major in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, wanted to spend his third tour of duty in the war on terror. “You don’t want a guy wielding a weapon after smoking that stuff,” Woodhams, a 7-year veteran of the Santa Monica Police Department, said during an interview last week. The husband and father of three had dedicated months to developing a police academy course curriculum and trained over 1,300 Afghan police and national army personnel on everything from hygiene, first aid and marksmanship to constitutional law and appropriate use of force. “That was critical,” Woodhams, 38, said of his work to create the first-ever Afghan Uniformed Police Academy. “That’s our exit strategy, to prepare them [to provide security for themselves] so we could come home.” He was anxious to see how the men he trained would perform. He believed they were ready. Unfortunately, so were those corSEE CP PAGE 9
Brandon Wise brandonw@smdp.com
CLEANING PARTY: Volunteers from the Red Cross Van Nuys District help tidy up the beaches of Santa Monica during the annual Heal the Bay California Coastal Cleanup on Saturday morning. Thousands of volunteers scoured California’s shoreline, picking up trash along the way.
Coastal Cleanup a big draw BY ASHLEY ARCHIBALD Daily Press Staff Writer
SANTA MONICA BEACH As heavy clouds lay thick over the bluffs of Santa Monica and Malibu and a chilly breeze blew in off the gray peaks of the ocean waves, thousands of people swarmed Santa Monica beach Saturday, looking for the little pieces of modernity that should never have been left behind. The group, almost 2,000-strong, represented a portion of the 14,000 volunteers across Los Angeles County organized by Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay as part of the California Coastal Cleanup, a statewide initiative to pick up the millions of pounds of trash that pollute the local waterways. The event marked the 27th year of the
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California Coastal Cleanup, which, in connection with the International Coastal Cleanup organized by the Ocean Conservancy, is the largest volunteer event in the world, according to state officials. It's funded by the sale of Whale Tail license plates, a new design of which was released just recently. According to preliminary results released by the Coastal Commission with 80 percent of the 800 sites reporting, tens of thousands of people removed 600,000 pounds of garbage from the coastlines, waterways and even inland areas of California. At the five sites in Santa Monica, volunteers collected 1,200 pounds of trash. The interior areas are just as important as the beaches, as 60 to 80 percent of
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garbage comes from as far as 60 miles away. “We want to catch it before it gets to the beaches,” said Eveline Bravo, the beach programs manager with Heal the Bay, an organization that advocates for environmental policies and ocean-friendly legislation. The small pieces of plastic and other materials that wash into the ocean through waterways and storm drains can kill wildlife, harm industries that rely on the ocean and even become a hazard to human health. Last year, 14,131 volunteers in Los Angeles collected 137,422 pounds of trash. This year, 10,964 volunteers collected 44,038 pounds, according to Heal the Bay. In order to not only remove trash, but SEE CLEANUP PAGE 8
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