Twas a gorgeous day for the cleanup…hardly a cloud in the sky with temperatures in the mid-60’s. I would call our effort at Bull Run and Route 28 in Manassas, sponsored by REI of Fairfax, both a success and a disappointment. It was my fourth or fifth cleanup including a couple on the Potomac River in Point of Rocks and one off Walney Road in Chantilly. We picked up less trash, with a turnout of about 40 people, than I had on previous cleanups with 25 to 50 percent of the participants.
Apparently a local Boy Scout troop recently adopted that stretch of Bull Run so it seems like our efforts would have been better utilized elsewhere. I see plenty of trash in creeks that I pass by on walks around my neighborhood! Additionally, we suspected that much of the trash had been washed further downstream by the wicked runoff we had from more than 70 inches of snow this winter.
You can see the results at the Alice Ferguson Foundation web site which says we collected nearly 113 tons of trash from 214 reporting sites in the Potomac River Water. One of my pictures below tells the tale of how much we collected…pretty weak but the trash just wasn’t there.
