From afar, the tiny white specks made it seem as though it had snowed at Huntington State Beach.

In reality, they were thousands of tiny polystyrene foam balls — debris leaked from bean bag chairs at two big beach concerts over the weekend.

Kevin Dickinson got on his electric bike to survey the damage days after the party ended.

“This does not biodegrade,” the Huntington Beach resident said as he filmed the remaining debris on the evening of Wednesday, June 27. “It keeps going, and going, they’re everywhere.”

An estimated 30,000 people showed up in Huntington for an electronic dance music event Saturday and a country music festival on Sunday.

By Thursday the lightweight pellets, dispersed by the wind over the past few days, were still stuck in bushes, at the beach showers, along concrete walls by the parking lot, at a nearby ecological reserve and in gutters as far as a half mile away from the concert site, according to Dickinson.

Environmental impact

Promoter Steve Thacher, founder of Anaheim-based Activated Events, said the two bean bag chairs opened and spilled their polystyrene foam pellets at Saturday’s event.

“Someone opened up two of the bean bags, I don’t know if it’s purposeful or what,” he said. “We got on it, we got all that we could. … We’re sifting through the sand and still cleaning it up”

Thacher said workers with shop vacuums were on the beach sucking up the pellets, though he was unsure of how many were left.

He said they will continue the clean-up effort.

“That is unfortunate, we do apologize for that,” he said, noting that the same bean bag chairs are used at several events through the year, and they’ve never had a problem with them. “We value the community too.”

Video taken Wednesday showed piles of the white pellets near the bean bag chairs. They were removed from the sand later in the day, but it was unclear whether the pellets were cleaned up by workers or whipped away by the wind.

In a later interview, Thacher added that he had hired extra workers, and that the beach was clean by Thursday afternoon.

Thacher is also being fined for not having his equipment out of the event area in time, said Kevin Pearsall, State Parks Superintendent. While everything has been taken off of the beach, equipment remains in the parking lot.

“Because his stuff is in the parking lot, we can’t sell those parking spaces,” he said.

State Parks will do a final walk-through with an environmental scientist to assess any remaining damage from the polystyrene foam, like whether it got into nearby wetlands, he said.

Pearsall said the state may decide to add on additional fees for future events to cover the cost of neighborhood clean-up or street sweeping.

“We are reevaluating the way we let these kinds of events occur, put up and take down, for the future,” Pearsall said.

“I think it’s important for the public to know we are disappointed. This weekend was the worst clean-up of any event we’ve ever had.”

Beach concerts

The first event, an electronic dance music festival titled Above and Beyond, had an estimated 20,000 people and drew 16 noise complaints by nearby residents.

Pearsall said it’s likely they will not have another similar event because of the way the repetitive bass sound travels.

The second event, also put on by Activated Events, was a country music event called Coastal Country Jam. It drew about 10,000 people, Pearsall said.

Typically, events have 48 to 72 hours to “be gone like they were never there.”

State Parks started hosting more concerts in recent years as a way to generate revenue for the parks system, with several big events on beaches around Orange County.

The most popular areas for concert venues are Huntington State Beach and Doheny State Beach.

A worker cleaning up the debris told Dickinson on Thursday that gathering up the tiny balls was nearly impossible. He said he was also told to not worry about the neighboring ecological reserve – that the city would clean up the remaining mess.

Dickinson noted that it’s more than the mess that is frustrating for local residents, including the parking lots that are blocked off the days before the event for set-up and after for the clean-up.

“The footprint of the concert is enormous,” he said.