A beautiful weekend with wonderful people cleaning up one of our favorite stretches of river. This was our first time hosting a cleanup in New Haven, and we are all a little starry-eyed with how beautiful and pleasant the town and its people are.
Any time we are cleaning up a part of the river for the first time, volunteers end up hauling a bunch of junk out of there. This was no exception - 155 volunteers removed 7.2 TONS of trash from the river floodplain in one day!
The river was really low for springtime, which made some places hard to access while exposing other areas for cleaning. We had excellent volunteers from New Haven, other local towns like Washington, St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia and more. Small children to community elders came to help out.
We had a couple of boats in disrepair and relied on help from our friend Allen Rost, a commercial fisherman from Morrison, MO, (and his family) and Heather Garrison, a fisheries biologist with the Mo. Dept. of Conservation to help our boat drivers shuttle volunteers out on the river.
We started working in the New Haven area the previous Friday. Our Education Coordinator Kristen Schulte visited classrooms in New Haven, then returned to visit classes in Owensville. On the Thursday before the clean-up, 60 students from Owensville Middle School and High School came to the New Haven Riverfront for a program called "Service Learning on the Missouri River", which includes team building exercises and river clean-up. Check out some photos from that day here.
Several of the students Kristen worked with came to the clean-up itself. It was great to see them back on the river!
These events would be impossible without the help of our sponsors and partners. We had some wonderful local sponsors hop on board. Astral Glass Studio was our primary local partner, helping us get the word out and meet other folks (plus donating a beautiful glass piece to our spring Art Auction). Pinckney Bend Distillery and Pepsi Cola Bottling of New Haven donated cash and supplied soda for volunteers. ALPS Mountaineering donated some wonderful gear that we raffled off to our volunteers. Town Hall Restaurant at Cedar Creek generously donated a huge meal for our volunteer Crew after the clean-up, and Lancito's Pizzeria kicked in our Friday night dinner at a huge discount.
Republic Services donated and delivered our disposal dumpster. Dave Blankenship from the City of New Haven Public Works operated the backhoe to move all of our trash up the ramp to the dumpster.
A partial list of trash recovered at the clean-up...
179 Bags Trash!!
plus…
63 tires on rims (+ 1 golf cart tire)
10 tires w/out rims (2 tractor trailer)
1 truck tire inner tube
1 Big Wheel
5 refrigerators/freezers
4 refrigerator doors
7 refrigerator racks
1 refrigerator compressor with coils
8 propane tanks (2 over 100-lb capacity)
1 seed compactor (6’ wide)
1 sheet plastic insulation board
light bulb1 carpet pad
1 green buoy
1 wooden dock
1 mattress
2 box springs
1 picnic table
1 end of a picnic table
13 large Styrofoam chunks (1 as big as a bed)
2 coolers
1 500-gal metal tank (rusted)
2 12-gal metal tanks
13 5-gal plastic buckets
7 55-gal metal drums
9 55-gal plastic barrels
needles
1 red milk crate
13 large plastic tubs (3 red, 2 gray, 2 green, 1 clear, 1 blue, 1 pink, 1 yellow, 1 white)
2 dishpans
1 country mailbox (plastic)
1 gin bottle full of hypodermic needles
2 antique brown pharmacy bottles
3 fluorescent light bulbs (42” long, intact)
3 antique light bulbs
1 mirror
1 dresser drawer (wooden)
3 lawn chairs
1 folding chair
1 chaise lounge (aqua)
fridge
1 school chair
1 child’s car seat
1 road STOP sign
1 livestock-feeding trough
1 garden hose
1 tube television
8 squares drain mat
1 car engine cover
1 fence post
1 duck decoy (no duck head)
1 picket fence piece
babydoll1 red plastic seesaw
1 blue plastic basketball hoop stand
1 Etch-a-Sketch
1 plastic bat
1 soccer ball
1 toy football (blue)
1 sneaker
3 flip-flops
1 green plastic disc (4’ across)
7 pieces rusted cable wire
6 sheets corrugated metal
squishing1 gas pipe (6’ long)
1 rebar (8’)
1 2½” rubber hose
2 10’x4” PVC pipes
9 metal strips
1 sheet plywood
1 corrugated plastic pipe 12” diameter
2 corrugated plastic pipes 3” diameter (6’ long)
1 wooden sign (“Betty heart Bim” in black & white)
"Service Learning on the Missouri River" Photos on Facebook
ARTICLE - "Missouri River Cleanup In New Haven Successful - Over 100 Volunteers Pitch In" - Washington Missourian, April 22, 2016, by Don Kruse.
ARTICLE - "Volunteers Collect Nearly 5 Tons of Trash Along Missouri River in New Haven" - KLPW am - April 19, 2016 - by Kyle Quick
ARTICLE - "Missouri River Relief hosts OMS/OHS Students for Day of Learning at New Haven" - Gasconade Republican - April 20,2016 - by Dave Marner
Total Volunteers: 191
Total Trash Tonnage: 7.5 tons!!!
