- NEWS RELEASE
- July 27, 2005
Great
Miami River A Little Cleaner Now
An abandoned
meth lab. A popped safe. A car buried in silt. All the makings
for an intriguing story – but not the one you might expect.
It’s the story of a river cleanup not a drug deal gone bad.
All of these items were pulled from the Great Miami River last
weekend – along with dirty diapers, hundreds of plastic
bottles – nearly 200 tons of trash (or the weight of three
Boeing 747 jumbo jets).
More than
1,200 volunteers participated July 22 and 23 in the “Clean
Sweep of the Great Miami River” – a first-time effort
to clean up the entire 160-mile river in one weekend.
And clean
it up they did. Private citizens, businesses, conservation organizations,
and government agencies retrieved more than 400,000 pounds of
trash and about 1,000 tires. Companies and cities along the river
pitched in with volunteers and equipment to make the two-day
event possible.
“I think
we all did a great job planning and teaming together,” said
Tim McLelland of the Hamilton to New Baltimore Groundwater Consortium,
who helped organize the cleanup in the Butler County area.
“We
had perfect weather, but we’d have gone with it even in
the rain,” said Don Freisthler from the City of Sidney.
Braving the
elements was only one example of the dedication of organizers.
“One
of my key volunteers stepped on a nail during the clean-up, but
he wasn’t going to let a little thing like that keep him
from finishing his segment,” said Jeff Lange, president
of Protect Our Water Ways (POWW) of Piqua. It was Lange’s
group – which took on a 16-mile stretch of river –
that found the safe which was turned over to local law enforcement
officials who transported it to their evidence room.
With the
extensive list of items recovered from the river, it’s hard
to imagine that volunteers let anything get away, but some items
were just too large to carry either in a canoe or on foot.
Bruce Koehler,
President of Friends of the Great Miami, listed a refrigerator
perched about 10 feet up in a tree at Oxbow Wetland, just a few
miles upstream from the Ohio River.
Like many
cities along the river, City of Piqua law enforcement officers
patrol the streamside recreational trails regularly. Chief of
Police Wayne Wilcox said, “If we can attach an identity
to the person responsible for littering, we’ll follow up
and prosecute. Any citizen who can notify us when they see dumping
occur will help us fix this trash problem.”
The 2005
Clean Sweep was sponsored by Cargill, Veolia Water, the Miami
Conservancy District, Butler Soil & Water Conservation District,
the Hamilton to New Baltimore Groundwater Consortium, and the
Butler County Storm Water District.
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