The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

Carthage, Jasper County

Discussion

April 20, 2008

Jo Ellis: Group's efforts merit public's attention

CARTHAGE, Mo. — Suggestions from second-graders on how to clean up the environment caught my eye in last Thursday’s Joplin Globe.

In the same edition, I read a letter in the Voices section from Carthage resident Eric Ferrell thanking corporate sponsors and volunteers for helping to clean up the La Russell access point on Spring River earlier this month.

While Eric’s letter was gracious and appreciative, this effort to clear and recycle more than 30 years of trash along one of the most beautiful rivers in Southwest Missouri deserves more public attention and commendation, especially with Earth Day arriving on Tuesday.

Given the size of the illegal dump and the difficulty of access, this was a monumental task, requiring a multitude of organizational skills. At its fall meeting, Stream Team No. 2945 voted to clean up the dump site as one of its 2008 projects. The cleanup began March 29, with 12 of the members doing preliminary work. They removed sofas, mattresses, tires and all types of discarded metal pieces — a total of 1.13 tons of trash.

Picking up that kind of trash on a 63-foot drop-off at a 39-degree slope leading to the river was, in Ferrell’s words, “challenging, dangerous and exhaustive.” A 100-foot, three-eighths-inch rope with a three-eighths-inch spring-link carabiner was helpful in pulling the bags of litter through thorny underbrush. The following Saturday, more than 100 large, trash-filled bags, weighing in at 1.87 tons, were collected.

All the scrap metal, estimated at 2 tons, was loaded on two trucks provided by Jim Doty Trash Service, Aurora. A bucket truck, volunteered by Robinson Excavating and Construction, La Russell, helped remove heavier pieces such as freezers, washers and dryers, stoves, water tanks, car parts, and bales of wire and fencing. Two stream team members in a flatboat gathered loads of debris from the river itself. Everything collected was divided into three categories: recyclable metal, tires or trash.

Volunteers worked from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with only a brief respite for lunch. No one was injured, but had that happened, an ambulance from McCune-Brooks Regional Hospital was on hand all day. Other equipment and service providers were Pinewood Nursery and Everts Farms, both of La Russell; the Missouri Stream Team; and Carthage Water & Electric Plant. Altogether, more than 8 tons of trash was removed from the site.

In addition to Stream Team No. 2945, volunteers included Alpha Gamma Rho Fraternity, Springfield; Jasper County Water Watchers Stream Team No 3320, Webb City; Chert Glades Master Naturalist Chapter, Joplin; and McNamara New Hope Boys Home, La Russell. It was truly a regional effort.

The second-graders’ suggestions for cleaning our environment may need a bit of tweaking (such as Bekka Saunders’ suggestion that “We should pick up trash by an ocean and if (people) don’t live by one, they’ll have to drive to one.”) But, with the kind of role models they can see around them, I’m sure they will soon get it right.

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Carthage, Jasper County
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