Saturday, October 19, 2013
Hartsburg Missouri River Clean-up 2013
Hartsburg MDC Public Boat Access, Hartsburg, MO
It had been since 2008 when we last enjoyed morels, music and mud in this tiny speck of a river town. But as part of our 1st "Annual" Mid-Missouri River Clean-up, we set our sites on one small town in mid-MO on the third weekend in October. On October 19th, we worked our final big event of the year and it was a blast!
Saturday morning started blustery, ended sunny, and brought around 194 volunteers to the river to pick up trash. Fall colors were beginning to explode on the bluffs and several rafts of pelicans were seen moving through the area. A beautiful day with tons of volunteers from the Hartsburg area, Jefferson City and Columbia.
This was our third Hartsburg clean-up, and we really had to search hard to find the trash here. A huge shout out to the FEMA Americorps group for staying all afternoon and sorting through all the trash for recyclables. Big thanks to Advanced Disposal and Jim's Tire Salvage for handling part of our waste stream. And thanks to Terry Durham at Eridu Farms for letting our crew camp for the weekend at his beautiful elderberry farm!
Even on a chilly Saturday morning, over 190 volunteers teamed up at the MDC Public Boat Access in Hartsburg to help clean-up 9 miles of the Missouri River. Over 115 bags of trash were collected and sorted through, resulting in 39 bags of recyclables, along with tons of scrap metal, appliances, and other materials including a small john boat!
After bringing the volunteers back for lunch the River Relief crew worked on hauling back all of the trash.
Check out the full Trash Tally and photo essay on our Rivernotes Blog. To see photos from the event, check out our Flickr or Facebook albums.
A huge thanks to our agency partners who provided boats at the clean-up to help shuttle volunteers: we were joined by the Mo. Dept. of Conservation, Mo. Dept of Natural Resources, and the MU Coop Unit in addition to our 5 boats.
It takes a real leap of faith to get down & dirty on the Mighty MO and we can't thank our Hartsburg sponsors, partners and volunteers (listed on the right) enough for all of the support! A ton of high school and college students, local clubs and stream teams showed up in full force, even some all the way from Kansas City. What an amazing group effort!
Thank You!!!
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