Tons of trash. Bottles and bottles and bottles. Tires, tree limbs and at least one television set.
    This is what Baltimore County workers, volunteers and elected officials pulled from Back River during a massive cleanup Friday and Saturday.
    “See all this crap?” Larry Farinetti asked a reporter from the stern of a flat-bottomed “jon” boat on the Back River tidal flats near the I-695 bridge Friday morning. “It’s all from Herring Run.”
    Farinetti, the chairman of the board of directors of the Back River Restoration Committee, was speaking of the river’s main tributary, which starts in Towson and winds through Baltimore City before emptying into Back River.
    A loon flew low over the water as several jon boats meandered up or down the channel near the flats. Brian Schilpp, BRRC secretary, waded on the flats in hip boots, pulling tire after tire from the muck and hauling it to an awaiting boat.
    “We’re going to get it all,” he shouted out. “Every last piece.”
    Workers scooped bottles from the shoreline or snagged them with nets from boats on the open water.
    Battle Grove resident and BRRC vice president George Malone skippered boatload after boatload of tires to volunteers waiting on the shore as rain clouds loomed.
    “Yeah, I got soaked” when the rain let loose and when he slipped and fell in the mud, Malone said.
    The cleanup had been scheduled to occur during very low lunar tides to give access to more debris, but the influence of  Tropical Storm Danny resulted in higher-than-expected
tides, Malone said.
    All the same, he was impressed by the efforts and was pleased with what he called a “tremendously successful” cleanup.
    “It went really well,” said Candace Croswell, manager of the Capital Program and Operations Section for the county’s Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management.
    About 260 volunteers turned out to work the next day, a muggy Saturday morning, Croswell said.
    Three Argo amphibian vehicles, 15 jon boats, a pontoon boat and a small barge were enlisted for the effort.
    “So we were able to get a lot done,” Croswell said.
    Among the volunteers were 98 football players from Eastern Vocational Technical High School.
    “They hit that beach like a swarm of bees,” said Malone, a teacher at Eastern Tech for 28 years. “Plucked it clean.”
    Elected officials included state Sen. Norman Stone (6th District), state delegates Michael H. Weir Jr. and John Olszewski Jr. (6th District) and County Councilman John Olszewski Sr. (7th District). Eric Schwab, deputy secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and DEPRM director Jonas Jacobson also were present, Croswell said.
    The volunteers collected about 300 tires and filled 10 large, 40-cubic-yard roll-off bins with tree limbs, debris and trash.
    “That’s a lot,” Croswell said of the trash volume. “There were a lot of plastic bottles,” she said. “It was incredible.”
    But with all that effort, the storm Saturday night brought more debris and bottles into the river, Croswell said, underlining the need to focus on educating people about litter and their waterways.
    “People really need to stop throwing plastic bottles into storm drains,” she said.
    Croswell is working to coordinate the installation of a garbage collection boom within the next six months, to be located under the I-695 bridge. Her agency and the BRRC will schedule another cleanup of the flats with an additional volunteer event planned for the spring.
    She hoped that all the volunteers getting muddy would help with spreading the word that people need to control their garbage.
    A cleanup event is scheduled for Sept. 12 at 8 a.m. for Bread and Cheese Creek, which feeds into Back River downstream of the Eastern Avenue bridge.