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Teens clean Albany

• Florida youths team with Keep Albany-Dougherty Beautiful to “visually enhance” Albany neighborhoods.

Holly McCarthy

ALBANY —Apparently, the intensity of the midday sun, the hordes of gnats, even the sweltering heat isn’t enough to keep Matthew Boyd from volunteering.

“I do it to help the environment and to reach others about God,” said the rising ninth-grader.

Boyd was among eight youths and four adults from BEACH United Methodist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., who walked the perimeter of Lake Loretta on Dawson Road Tuesday to install catch basin markers. The group teamed with Keep Albany-Dougherty Beautiful, placing hunter green aluminum disks imprinted with a turtle encircled by the words “No dumping — drains to river.”

The markers are meant to remind people that only rainwater should flow into the catch basins, as any other material drains untreated directly into the Flint River, according to Justin Kendall with the city of Albany Engineering Department.

“Hopefully this will deter people from putting stuff in the catch basins,” Kendall said. “We’re trying to make a difference.”

Kendall, who instructed the group on proper disk-installation technique, estimated that they would place up to 60 markers along Edgewater Drive and a section of Dawson Road.

The youth group of rising sixth- to ninth-graders consisted of four boys and four girls.

BEACH members also volunteered Monday, raking and picking up debris from seven senior citizens’ yards along the 100 block of Lexington Drive.

The residents enjoyed the help and were appreciative, according to team leader Mark Baughman.

“Most of the people that we ministered to yesterday were not physically able to get out there and do it,” he said, “especially in this weather.”

Baughman said the BEACH volunteers decided to come to Albany because their youth pastor, Ryan Stone, has family in the Leesburg area.

“We wanted to take a domestic trip to a city within driving distance, ” said Stone. “We talked to people from Savannah and Tampa, but the best and most hopeful responses were from the Albany area.

“Really, I wanted to eat my grandmother’s cooking,” Stone quipped.

The group plans to meet at the Albany Civic Center today, where members will be assigned to a neighborhood where they will remove graffiti.

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