Rocheport Bend Day of Caring Cleanup 2009

Saturday, April 18, 2009
Rocheport, MO, and Overton Bottoms North Unit of Big Muddy National Fish & Wildlife Refuge

Over 130 volunteers worked on both sides of the Missouri River on Rocheport Bend, cleaning up trash, planting trees and removing invasive garlic mustard. Our river clean-up volunteers removed over 5 tons of trash from the floodplain and along the Katy Trail!

The event, called the Rocheport Bend Day of Caring, was a partnership between Missouri River Relief, Missouri River Communities Network, Americorps-Vista, West Junior High, Friends of Rocheport and the Big Muddy Refuge.

Volunteers showed up to clean-up a collapsed house site along the Katy Trail, scour the trailside woods for tires and trash, and hit the river to take care of a few trashy sites we scouted out. Thanks to the relentless muscle of Don Dougherty and Alvin Sweezer, we got rid of a massive commercial freezer and a pile of tires we'd wanted to get for several years.

Volunteers also helped Big Muddy Refuge staff to pull invasive garlic mustard plants from the bottomland forest. And....over 50 West Junior High students worked their butts off all morning with the Americorps Stream Team Assistants from Missouri River Communities Network planting over 300 trees along Moniteau Creek and the parks of Rocheport.

For more photos, stories and results, check out our blog, flickr site and results page (links on the right).

Special thanks to Brett and Tawnee Dufur for hosting our crew camp in the lawn at their beautiful Katy Trail Bed & Bikefest! And thanks to Jim Salmon's Tire Salvage for coming to haul off our muddy tires once again.

Trash Tally

114+ Bags of Trash! Plus...
111 Tires:  72 on the rim, 37 w/o rims, 1 truck tire, 2 inner tubes, 1 bicycle
4 Refrigerators
1 Chest Freezer in parts
1 Hot Water Heater
1 Dryer
5 Coolers
1 Bed Frames
4 Box Springs
5 Chairs
4 30-gallon Trash Cans
4 5-gallon Plastic Buckets
80 feet of 1” Poly Tubing
9 1-gallon Paint/Varnish Cans
10 feet of Garden Hose
10 feet of Plastic Piping
17 assorted Scrap Metal pieces
1 Hot Tub w/ Cover
1 Ironing Board
1 very ugly old woman rubber mask
1 Lock Pick Set
1 Lot Fence Wire
3 3-gallon Metal Buckets
1 Typewriter
3 55-gallon Metal Drums
1 Park Bench
1 Camping Table
1 Truck Bed Liner
1 Fire Extinguisher
1 Toilet
Several hundreds of pounds of roof shingles
1 Kitchen Sink
13 Mason Canning Jars