Kansas City Missouri River Cleanup 2011

Berkley Riverfront Park - Kansas City, MO
Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Due to flooding and high river levels this year, we based the Kansas City Missouri River Cleanup out of Berkley Park where 20-year cleanup veteran and Kansas City Coordinator, Vicki Richmond made arrangements for volunteer groups to disperse to 11 land-based sites up and down the river.

For normally being a river-based operation, the clean-up was still a huge success and made cleaning up post-flood even better, and more efficient.  257 volunteers showed up on a gorgeous late summer morning, to pick up their pumpkin orange Clean Sweep t-shirts, and sign up for one of the many pre-scouted land-based sites.

With the help of the Kansas City parks crews, designated site leaders and partnering organizations like Friends of the Kaw and Friends of Riverfront park, we were able to team up and put some muscle into knocking out much of the flood damage that the river had left on some of our favorite Kansas City riverfronts in addition to picking up piles of trash carelessly dumped or left behind over time.

Working by land actually gave us the opportunity to clean places we had never cleaned before!  Sites included Berkley Park, Riverfront Park, Kaw Point Park, the Choteau Bridge, the Riverfront Heritage Trail, Stillwell and more!  Since there were so many separate sites, we are still working on compiling a tonnage estimate.  But let me tell you, there were some pretty amazing piles of trash by the end of the day!  Check out our full set of photos from this year's Kansas City River Cleanup on our Flickr.