People have befouled lakes and rivers, and now it’s up to people to clean them.
Two unrelated groups of volunteers set out Saturday to do that, one working on a stretch of the Missouri River, the other along the shores of Carter Lake.
Ninety-four volunteers signed on to work with Missouri River Relief, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to cleaning the Missouri from Yankton, S.D., to St. Louis, 811 miles in all.
The project Saturday in Omaha focused on riverbanks, marinas, coves and homeless camps on a 7-mile stretch of the Missouri.
About 2 miles north of Missouri River Relief’s base camp, 70 volunteers made their way around Carter Lake in the Carter Lake Preservation Society’s seventh annual cleanup.
Jeanne Eibes of the Carter Lake group said it’s a different kind of cleanup now.
The first cleared out safes, guns, bowling balls and all manner of odd stuff that had accumulated over decades in and around the lake. The society has taken care of that assortment of junk, and now volunteers expect to find just a year’s worth of bottles, cans, hubcaps and tires.
“It’s so much better,” Eibes said. About that time, someone yelled out that they had found a gun. Then they held up a water pistol.
Back along the Missouri River, 6-year-old Callie Stalnaker was about to board an aluminum boat with other members of Coram Deo Church in Omaha. Eleven from the church had volunteered for the river cleanup.
Asked what she expected to find, Callie said, “Maybe, like, plastic bottles.” Then, eager to stop talking, get on the boat and start working, she said to her mother Jodi: “C’mon.”
Besides cleaning the riverbanks, Missouri River Relief wants to revive the relationship people and cities have with the river, said Steve Schnarr, the organization’s program manager.
When people get in boats and view the river from the water or free its banks of styrofoam, glass and plastic junk, they develop an affinity with the river that will serve them and the waterway well, Schnarr said.
The Missouri is a great river, he said, the longest in North America. It runs 2,340 miles from Montana to St. Louis. The 94 people who went out on seven boats picked up about 3.5 tons of trash along the Missouri River’s banks, Schnarr said.
That heavy load collected along 7 miles of the river is a tiny fraction of the junk along its full length. But if people get to know a river, Missouri River Relief contends, they won’t be as inclined to trash it.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1123, rick.ruggles@owh.com
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