Nails in the Streets and Bike Lanes

Daily nail pickup

Lets start this blog with an explanation. Three maybe four years ago while walking my dog DeDe I noticed several nails in the street.

These nails were at a turn around on Miner Street South of 22nd Street next to the new marina, Cabrillo Way. Miner Street runs north and south while 22nd Street runs West to East.

Flat tire in Marina Parking Lot
Most of the nails I pickup are around that intersection of Miner and 22nd. I may have failed to mention that I live on a sailboat in San Pedro with my two dogs. San Pedro is about as far south you can get in Los Angeles.

Daily nails on top of jar lid

 At first I threw the nails in the trash but I kept finding them in the same spots. With DeDe we would walk to the beach one day and the next toward the Main Channel so our path were in opposite direction every other day.

Street Corner here

After collecting about a thousand nails in a Von's paper bag I took them to the District 15 Supervisor office in San Pedro's old city hall. Two young staff members listed to short story of the nails and then told me unless they could prove intent on the part of the person tossing the nails nothing could be done. I left them with the nails with the feeling that nothing would be done which is now the case.

I have shown the nails to the Los Angeles Fire Department, The LA County Sheriffs, several LA Port Police officers, Harbor Department Security, various Harbor Department employees, several business owners where the nails show up on a regular basis, two local news papers, Channel 5 and then 11 while a reporter was filming after a fire .



In the calendar year 2016 I posted several nail pictures on Instagram then decided to count the number of nails picked up that year, it was just a little over 2,000 nails.After that I stopped counting but didn't stop saving. When my dog got to old for longer walks we stopped. Then one day she stopped completely. So I started running in the mornings and discovered nails around Ports of Call and various other streets like Crescent Street.

Then nails started to appear at our Marina parking entrance which is Watchorn Walk. Usually they appear next to the mail box beside the office building past the Double Tree Inn on Via  Cabrillo  Marina and contine north along the street. The count can be five or six and as high as twenty.

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another sample below of a daily find

For a while this year there was a drought of nails where I would find four or five but recently the tosser changed his pattern from Miner to mostly 22nd Street. There were 52 this morning between the drive way entrance to Cabrillo Way Marina and Miner mostly on the North side of 22nd. That is where the filming production companies park their trucks and crews here. I have spoken to their security, their vans drivers (after I saw one run over several nails) and the LAPD motorcycle officers that moonlight for the studios.

We (my neighbors) have several theories about the nails and recently we have been trying to establish a time frame to see when the nails get tossed. 

My lovely daughter got me a German Shepherd puppy two days before Christmas and the pup was too young to chase nails which gave me a break. Well Happy is just a year old now and we walk between 7 to ten miles each day. Then Happy ate some people food three weeks ago and had to make a midnight visit to the bushes. Happy loves to chase feral cats and in the middle of the street he spotted one but it was not a cat but a scared little pocket dog. Happy followed it to the bushes below the Fort (we are docked east of Ft. MacArthur)

We now have a Yorkshire mix we have named Lucky. With the GSD I was able to pickup nails in the street without many problems but with Baby Dog and two leads and morning traffic you might hear a lot of cussing.

A work in Progress (To be continued)