A record 25 people descended on Auburn's Parkerson Mill Creek Saturday afternoon. They returned two hours later with bags of plastic, metal, glass and other garbage pulled from the rocky water.
The project, a partnership between the city and Auburn's Risk Management & Safety Department, happens at least twice a year as a way to keep the on-campus stream as healthy as possible.
"This is the largest cleanup we've ever done," said Dusty Kimbrow, watershed program coordinator for the City of Auburn. "I hope we can get some momentum from this."
Volunteers met near the Intramural Field, where Kimbrow passed out maps, gloves, trash-tongs and plastic bags. The workers then split into groups to comb the creek for garbage. Several student volunteers from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers and the Department of Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences were among those who attended.
Some of the trash was to be expected such as tennis balls, plastic bags, cups, soda cans and broken beer bottles. But there was also a waterlogged car mat, several chunks of rusty metal railing and two 20-foot pipes, which were all hauled out of the water to be collected later.
One form of trash that came up again and again was endless handfuls of blue-and-orange plastic ribbon from fan shakers waved at athletic events. Kimbrow and other volunteers half-joked that the inventor of a biodegradable shaker could make a lot of money.
"Awareness is the big thing. A lot of people don't even know there's a creek flowing through campus, or downtown Auburn," Kimbrow said.
The stream begins around Toomer's Corner, but has been paved over and is invisible for long stretches, Kimbrow said. It only becomes visible again outside the Wellness Kitchen, and then becomes a full surface stream running between the Hutsell-Rosen Track and Intramural Field.
The creek connects to Chewacla Creek and then the Tallapoosa River before winding its way into the Gulf of Mexico.
"We're all connected," Kimbrow said, adding that other area creeks like Chewacla and Town Creek could use the same anti-litter treatment later on.
"There's not a lack of trash in the creeks, unfortunately," he said.
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