Earth Day 2010 along the NW Branch
Piney Branch Site
Our Piney Branch (Forest Park Apartments) site went very well. We had a total of 15 volunteers including an Environmental Biology student and three visitors of the apartment complex. We worked from 9 am to 12:30 pm. We picked up at least 25-30 bags of trash. We also consolidated many of the bags so they were as full as possible and reused the old bags. We probably would have been able to collect much more but we were dealing with an extremely steep embankment. For every step you took up with a bag of trash, you would slide 2 steps back. You could only fill each bag about half way to even be able to get it out of the woods. This slowed down the process considerably. There definitely wasn't a shortage of trash though. There were layers upon layers buried under dirt and debris that had been dumped there. Much of the trash we found was old. There were a lot of glass bottles and broken glass everywhere. This site will need to be revisited many more times.On top of the bags of trash, we also pulled out a number of other items. We took out about 6 tires, 2 mattress springs, a section of a fence, about 3 wooden pallets, a DVD player, a bed frame, several car parts, 4 shopping carts (we used these to transport the trash to the dumpster), a childrens basketball hoop, various cables, a few decomposing carpets, a plastic patio chair, and many more items. One of our volunteers found a child's wheelchair, which he kept to pass on to an organization that refurbishes wheelchairs. I believe he also donated a crutch to them as well.
In terms of wildlife, we saw a wild domestic cat and on volunteer found a salamander while digging for trash.
