Lee County’s annual Rivers Alive cleanup is Saturday

LEESBURG — More than 180 volunteers are expected to descend on Lee County waterways Saturday as the community embarks on its annual Rivers Alive cleanup project to remove unwanted, and often dangerous, debris from parts of the Flint River and the Kinchafoonee and Muckalee creeks.

According to Jim Wright, the main organizer of the event and the head of Lee County’s Code Enforcement office, the cleanup effort, has become a yearly tradition for many lovers of Lee County’s waterways. The focus this year will be on trying to remove debris that accumulated in the creeks and the river in the wake of extreme flooding that ravaged county residents around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

“We’ve done such a good job the past nine years that we pretty well got things cleaned up,” Wright said. “We had gotten a lot of the bigger stuff, and it was getting harder to find stuff. With the flooding, now we’re back to getting our place cleaned up again, so to speak.”

In fact, Wright said the amount of debris and trash that was evident in the wake of the flood prompted Lee County leaders to consider organizing multiple cleanup events this year.

“Ben Roberts, the other code enforcement officer, and I boated up the creeks after the flood and were amazed at the amount of stuff we saw,” said Wright. “We usually just do the one event each year, but this year we’re going to have three. The first one we had was the Great American Cleanup, which is usually a land event. Now we’re doing Rivers Alive and later this fall we’ve heard that Georgia Power is going to lower the lake levels, and I think that’s really when we’re going to see some stuff.”

Although Wright said he expects to find some interesting things over the course of the river cleanups, it’s likely he won’t see anything more unusual than some of the debris he and others have already pulled from the creek during past years. Wright said they’ve pulled out sunken boats, a fully-intact trailer that one of the volunteers ultimately took home, a washer, a dryer, multiple bikes, some newspaper stands, lots of tires, and several 55-gallon drums filled with old demolition materials.

“We’ve gotten all kinds of crazy stuff out of that creek,” he said.

In addition to removing larger items, Wright said cleanup volunteers will also help to combat the growing problem of litter accumulation along the waterways as more people use the creek for recreational activities.

“I’m seeing quite a bit of beer cans strewn across the creek,” said Wright. “We are seeing quite a bit of litter on the water that somebody purposely threw on the banks, and that’s unfair. If everybody took a little bit out with them every time they were out there, we wouldn’t have much trash at all.”

While he says he’d like to see even more improvement, Wright said he’s pleased with the overall cleanliness of the creeks, much of which he says is directly related to the annual cleanups. Over the years, it’s estimated that Rivers Alive cleanup volunteers have removed more than 23 tons of debris from the county’s waterways, making them more pleasurable for boaters and fishermen.

“The Rivers Alive cleanup has done a number of things,” said Wright. “No. 1, it’s improved the quality of our waterways. It’s also removed a lot of things that are hazards.”

Wright also said local groups like the Lee County High School ROTC, Chehaw Park, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, Lee County Public Works, the Flint RiverQuarium, Georgia DNR, the Lee County Fire Department, Judy Bowles and Keep Albany-Dougherty Beautiful, and others have been vitally important in the cleanup efforts.

Wright added that the events have also gotten more people involved in boating, kayaking and canoeing, which are activities that he thinks make Southwest Georgia a great place to live.

“I’m glad to see kayaking taking off,” said Wright. “People always say there’s nothing to do around here, nothing going on in Albany. Well, there’s plenty to do, you just ain’t doing it. Being on the water is something the whole family can enjoy.”