Clark County Chapter of Friends of the Black River Have Great Clean-Up
Saturday, May 4th, 2019 -- 12:58 PM
-The Clark County Chapter of the Friends of the Black River held their rive clean-up this past weekend.A spoke with Adam Marciniak, a local man who started the Clark County Chapter of the Friends of the Black River, and he talked about how the river clean-up on Saturday went.
“We had a very good turnout. We had approximately 50 volunteers show up. And we started around 8:30 and we wrapped up around 11am. So, we got a good two and a half hours out of everybody and we were able to cover a lot of ground. That included about 2 and ¾ miles of roadway, which were River Ave and Hill Ave and potions of Opelt Avenue. We were able to get about ¾ of a mile on the south side of O’Neil Creek cleaned up and approximately 10 acres worth of public land, mostly in the Hill Road, River Road area.”
Adam talked about some of the items they found in the river.
“We found pretty much everything. We almost could have assembled a whole care with some of the car parts we found! The most momentous pile of stuff was the 58 tires we recovered. We found 3 or 4 mattresses, we found a chest freezer, we found three illegal dump sites and a couple of them actually had identifying information, so those are being looked into by the authorities. We found curtains with the curtain rods in them, toys, beer cans, beer bottles. Just about everything we found."
The Friends of the Black River are working on organizing a fall clean up as well.
“We’re hoping to get one organized for mid to late August. At our next board meeting, we plan to set that date and we plan to announce those dates when we get a few things firmed up. We’re trying to get a little bit more community involvement with this one as far as having more for the community to do besides clean up. We hope to get some DNR representation and the Wave Stream Monitoring Program that our organization Friends of the Black River is going to be doing in Clark County. We hope to get some representation from the program there to educate the community on what we’re doing and maybe help get some volunteers for that Wave Program as well.”
The group has some projects they hope to work on this fall.
“Those are going to be the main focus over the summer while we work on the fall clean-up. For those projects, like the old fishing line containers, we’re looking into getting some local groups involved. We’re dealing with the youth programs to help with the assembly or even the donation of the cost of the materials and plan to correlate that with some of the other projects. The Neillsville Improvement Corporation here in town has a canoe designation project for putting some signing up for existing canoe landings that the public may not know are canoe landings. So some of those projects go hand-in-hand and we hope to tackle as much as that as we can this summer as well as providing trash bags at some of these locations where we found a lot of this trash.”
Adam ended our interview by saying thank you!
“First, I just want to thank all the volunteers that came out and helped us accomplish our goals of getting this clean-up done and successful. And then all the area businesses and supporters that helped make this project possible, I just wanted to say thank you to that. And also, I just wanted to add is that the biggest help we can get in this clean-up effort is to not get that garbage and trash in there in the first place. There is definitely watchful eyes now on a lot of these areas because we had 50 volunteers that spent a good portion of their day cleaning up, so there’s definitely going to be people keeping an eye on what we accomplished.”
Again, the group would like to do another clean up this fall. They also hope to turn the event into more of a community festival.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.