On Saturday, October 16, Mary Vestal Park had its largest overhaul in years. Was a new playground added? Ball field? Landscaping? No, nothing was added to the park. Instead, the overhaul came in the form of taking tons of trash away. Between nine and noon on that Saturday morning, the park and its stream, Goose Creek, had thousands of pounds of waste removed.
Much of the garbage found during the three hour clean-up was basic litter - soda pop bottles, food wrappers, etc. - but there was also a significant amount of what was deemed "dumping" trash. Marty Pleasant, a Knox County storm water engineer, was at the site helping out. He commented on the "dumping" trash: "Tons of tires and gas tanks were collected and we also found an office." This office was an assortment of equipment including a television, word processor, projector screen, executive chair, and other typical office supplies.
Hana Lamb and Hannah Payne, two South Doyle Middle School seventh graders, volunteered at Mary Vestal Park and collected bags upon bags of trash. They thought their best find was an oversized teddy bear that they dug out of the stream bank, but they had the most fun searching for items in the creek. Their Life Science teacher, Dave Gorman, and classmates also found interesting items ranging from footballs, to swing set parts, to Christmas decorations. "We made a lot of progress," said Pleasant, as he reflected on the trash pick-up and its effect on the quality of the park and stream.
Goose Creek was not the only stream being cleaned up that Saturday morning. Throughout Knox County, nine stream sites, from Halls to South Knoxville, had garbage pulled from them. Led by Knoxville’s CAC AmeriCorps team, over 150 other AmeriCorps volunteers from Tennessee assisted in cleaning Knox County’s creeks. Donating a total of five-hundred plus hours, residents of the "clean-up" neighborhoods were also a driving force in the process. Through their assistance, more than thirty tons of trash were removed in the ninth annual Knox County creek clean-up!
(Article by Anna Bauer of the Water Quality Team)
CPR 2004 - Update