On Saturday June 18, six Sewickley Creek Watershed Association members participated in River Sweep 2000. River Sweep, in its 12th consecutive year, is a riverbank cleanup of the Ohio River and its tributaries
Tom Keller, Sewickley Creek Watershed Association executive director, noted it was the third year association participants cleaned up the same site. "It was the worst year for trash," he said. A total of 30 bags and three tires were taken from the Brinkerton discharge on the Upper Sewickley Creek.
Phyllis Stefko, Ray Bennett, Ellen Uschak, Jared Govi, Jim Schimpf and Tom Keller picked bags of trash from the Upper Sewickley Creek, the railroad bed that runs back to the SCWA Coke Ovens, and all around the coke ovens. Trash items from baby clothes to car parts and wood products were found at the coke ovens. Piles of wire from burned tires were removed from several locations near the coke ovens.
River Sweep covert the entire length of the Ohio, from its origin at Pittsburgh to its end at Cairo, Ill. It also includes its tributaries among them the Allegheny, Cheat, Monongahela, West Fork and Youghiogheny rivers. Thus the Pennsylvania section of the cleanup process includes the Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Somerset, Washington and Westmoreland counties.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection preliminary report for this year's cleanup in the commonwealth, 1,000 participants gathered more than 1,963 bags of trash and 1,785 tires from more than 70 sites in the nine county area.
River Sweep is organized by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO) and environmental protection agencies from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Last year ORSANCO reported that 22,000 volunteers in the six stated collected more than 13,000 tone of trash and other items.
Corporation sponsors include AK Steel, Allegheny Energy, Allegheny Ludlum,BASF, CH2Hilll, Duquense Light, Exon, LTV Steel, Neville Chemical Company, NOVA Chemical, Tri-State River Products, Toyota and US Steel. Allegheny Energy is in its fifth year of supporting the cleanup in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The company reports that 350 volunteers worked at the 21 sites it coordinated. They collected approximately 250 cubic yards of debris, more than 1,200 bags of trash and more than 300 tires from waterways in Westmoreland, Fayette, Greene, Somerset and Armstrong counties in Pennsylvania and Harrison, Marion, Pleasants, Preston and Wood counties in West Virginia.
Trash collected included a kitchen sink, rubber raft, couches, bags of clothes, refrigerators, toilet, toilet seats, cable, credit cards from a stolen wallet, construction debris, box springs, stoves, televisions, car parts, vinyl siding, wheelbarrows and scrap metal.
"The event is a great benefit to the environment," said Pamela M Pershing, advisor for Strategic Environmental Management with Allegheny Energy. "We commend the efforts of our employees, local watershed and nonprofit organizations, environmental protection and natural resource agencies, an other volunteers who helped make River Sweep 2000 an overwhelming success," she said.
As such the Association shall use its resources to educate the citizens of the watershed as to sound environmental practices. In addition, the Association will seek out and cooperate with government agencies, interested organizations, businesses and individuals to implement programs to improve water quality and encourage proper land use.