Volunteers Clean Up Trash Along W.Va.7

Morgantown Dominion Post
26 March 2012

A handful of volunteers spent three hours Sunday picking up trash along W.Va. 7 east of Pioneer Rocks.

It was the spring cleanup organized by Friends of Deckers Creek (FODC), said Martin Christ, FODC water remediation director.

He was out there with the volunteers, collecting primarily wrappers from to-go foods and cups of to-go beverages. There were some beer cans and beer bottles, he said, including one new to him — an aluminum beer bottle.

There was even the occasional diaper, and some construction lumber that had been dumped over the side of the road.

The majority of what they found had been tossed from vehicles, he said, something that’s held true since he started with the FODC cleanups, in 1997.

He urged people to dump their trash in bins instead of throwing it from their vehicles.

Some of the half-dozen volunteers were on the Deckers Creek Trail, concentrating on continuing to dig trash from a dump FODC has been working on for 15 years, he said.

The problem is, as the cleared ground is disturbed by the weather, more trash comes to the surface and needs to be removed.

Joining him today, Christ said, were Karl Diefenbach, Greg Stephens, Tom Pue, Pamela Engelmann, and three FODC Youth Advisory Board members: Tesla Hickey, and Nathan and Katie Zucker.

The next cleanup is set for June 24.