On a glorious September morning more than 200 volunteers flocked to the Rivanna River, from its headwaters to the confluence with the James River in Columbia, VA, to give the river its annual fall cleaning. Hundreds of trash sacks were bulging full of debris and garbage, most of which RCS and its primary partner the Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District, (TJSWCD) was able to recycle.
More than 1000 pounds of heavy metal was pulled from the Woolen Mills/River View Park section of the river. According to one volunteer, Sally Thomas, chair of the Rivanna River Basin Commission, “this huge haul of metal is the result of decades of misuse of the Rivanna. With the breach of the dam last year we are now able to see and remove the car parts, pipes and metal plates.”
According to Robbi Savage, RCS Executive Director “the wonderful thing about this event is that it brings members of our community to the river to contribute their time and energy to its care. Children and their parents can work together to make a difference. Students from throughout the watershed (espeically those at UVA) did a lot of the heavy lifting and we couldn’t have gotten all that metal out of the river without them.”
Garnett Mellen, (TJSWCD) said that “this is our chance to give back to our river, to show our appreciation for the water that we use for drinking, bathing, swiming, paddling, farming and so on”
Summarizing the day, RCS President Angus Murdoch said “it’s a lot of work to plan and put this event together and it is worth every minute of prepreparation because at the end of the day our river is cleaner than it was just a few hours before. When you see all those bags of trash now on land waiting to be collected and appropriately disposed of and when you know that that trash was in our river polluting the water, it makes it all worthwhile.
