Two hours into Saturday morning’s cleanup along the banks of the White River’s eastern fork, Colin Massey had already picked up some amazing finds. “We found an entire rocking horse upstream,” Massey said. “Tires, some metal and the bottom half of a vacuum cleaner.” But most of what volunteers discovered during the cleanup, organized by the Beaver Watershed Alliance, was litter - empty beer cans, plastic shopping bags and degraded paper products - that is typically associated with a river that is floatable in the spring and skirts several municipalities as it flows toward Beaver Lake Courtney Thomas, the Beaver Watershed Alliance’soutreach coordinator, said activity at parks along a river often contributes to trash on the banks. “It’s not necessarily that people are throwing trash in the river while floating, but the runoff that takes place from city streets and parks,”Thomas said. “People come out and leave trash behind, then when it rains, it washes it into the river. It’s just part of maintaining urban rivers.” John Pennington, executive director of the Beaver Watershed Alliance, said he expected the 45 cleanup volunteers to collect about a ton of trash. “And that’s not a lot, 2,000 pounds of trash in 25 miles,” Pennington said. He said by comparison, volunteers for an Earth Day cleanup last week had collected approximately 200 pounds of trash in a quarter-mile section of Town Branch in Fayetteville. “So at 3 miles, you’re over a ton. So 3 miles in a city generates about the same as 25 out here in the rural countryside,” Pennington said. Pennington said the east fork of the White River probably has the best water quality of any portion of the river, which flows into Beaver Lake. The lake is the primary source of drinking water for more than 420,000 residents in Northwest Arkansas, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Beaver Lake watershed covers about 1,900 square miles.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 14:05:15 +0000
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