Click here for original link
by Ian Cummings
But a few steps into a wooded area overlooking the Blue River, they also found toilets, tires and refrigerators. They had to step carefully to avoid broken bottles.
Today organizers hope up to 1,000 volunteers will come out to the river to help clean up tons of litter and trash left by illegal dumping.
It could be one of the biggest cleanups ever in Missouri.
In fact, a spokesman for American Rivers, a national organization for river conservation, said today’s cleanup could be one of the biggest she’s seen.
“That would be an amazing show of force,” said Amy Kober.
The effort today is boosted by help from Missouri River Relief, a group that promises a major cleanup this year along the Missouri from Kansas City to St. Louis.
In March, the group did aerial photography along the Missouri banks to find the greatest concentrations of garbage and to detect trash that’s hard to see otherwise. Later this year, a barge will float down the river collecting refuse.
Today’s cleanup sounds like it could be a landmark effort, said Ken Midkiff, a Sierra Club official and an author on water quality who lives in Columbia.
“That’s huge,” Midkiff said. “If you have a thousand people show up, that would be one of the largest cleanups in the state.”
Vicki Richmond, coordinator of today’s Project Blue River Rescue, said she expected volunteers to include students, families, Boy Scouts and church groups. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., they will remove garbage and debris from 21 different sites from the mouth of the Blue River to 103rd Street and Interstate 435.
Four of those sites will be in Blue Valley Park.
Richmond, who is also a regional manager for Missouri River Relief, was among the scouts this week who found evidence of illegal dumping in the wooded ravine where the park meets the river. In the oxbow lake at the bottom of the ravine, where beavers have built a dam next to one constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, hundreds of tires have accumulated in the water.
Richmond, now of Kansas City, grew up playing and catching lighting bugs along river banks in Louisiana.
“Now, here, I don’t know that it’s safe to do that,” she said.
Glenn Banks, an employee of the Parks and Recreation Department, stopped by to bring a truckload of large rocks for the volunteers. They regularly use rocks, or sometimes telephone poles, as barriers to prevent trucks from backing up to the woods and dumping garbage.
Banks said he often witnessed illegal dumping in the park. Even if the cleanup was successful, he said, the garbage is likely to keep coming.
Richmond said the city’s help was critical. Today the Water Department will arrive with heavy equipment to help in the cleanup.
Volunteers will meet at the Lakeside Nature Center, 4701 E. Gregory Blvd., at 8 a.m. to organize work groups for the various cleanup sites. Trained supervisers will work with volunteers, who will be assigned to sites according to their age and ability.
Evan Smalley, a Kansas City volunteer, has created a rope and pulley system for hauling the toilets and tires up the steep sides of the ravine. The volunteers will take a boat into the oxbow to carry tires out of the water. For larger items, such as a refrigerator, there is nothing for it but muscle.
“When you finish, you can look back and it’s amazing, the difference it makes,” Smalley said.
He said that even if people continued to dump garbage in the river, it’s not everyone who does it.
“It’s just a few who don’t care,” he said.
Besides, he said, it’s important for volunteers to work together because it changes their attitudes toward the river and their neighborhoods.
Richmond has seen some heavy jobs in her time. On one of her Missouri River cleanups, volunteers removed 13 cars from an area that had been an illegal dump for years. Other sites produce strange collections of refuse, from propane tanks and computers to love letters and the occasional message in a bottle.
Missouri River Relief will celebrate its 10th anniversary with Big Muddy Clean Sweep, its first river barge cleanup tour.
From September through October, the group will steer a barge from Kansas City to the Mississippi River, near St. Louis, in a continuous cleanup effort. The barge will stop in river towns along the way for community cleanups, educational events and barge tours.
The aerial survey in March was conducted with GPS-synchronized cameras from a six-seat Cessna airplane operated by EcoFlight of Colorado.
The details
To learn more about Blue River cleanup efforts, call Friends of Lakeside Nature Center at 816-513-8960 or send an email to folnc@crn.org.
For more information about Missouri River Relief, call 573-443-0292 or go to www.riverrelief.org.
Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/01/2769905/for-blue-river-cleanup-organizers.html#ixzz1IZB3qzOC
Missouri River Relief has developed into an amazing organization in the ten years since it began.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dory!
ReplyDeleteWe have a great logo too (and a zillion other cool graphics), thanks to you!