SAVE Service Project

Today, our Brownie Troop helped out with the cleanup at Peter's Creek behind Oaklyn Public School.  The cleanup, hosted by St. Mark's Lutheran Church, became part of the troop's Wonders of Water Journey as our SAVE Water project.  Troop members Audrey, Kennedy, Erin, Riley, Anna, and birthday-girl Madeline came out today to get into the muck and clean up the creek.

The morning dawned beautifully.  Eleanor from St. Mark's gave us a quick lesson in the current conditions of the creek, and explained how the creek is part of the Newton Creek Watershed.  They showed us on a map where the creek is, and how it relates to the larger watershed.  Then, rakes and trash bags in hand, we headed down the banks to get to work. 

Two hours, dozens of trash bags, and three trucks full of trash, we were finished for the day. Other volunteers continued working in the rain, but after two hours of hard work in the muck, we were exhausted.  Some of the more astonishing trash pulled out of the creek today included:  a buoy from the Delaware river, a plastic shopping cart, a bike, a baby pool, a trash can, a large chunk of chain link fencing, a lumberyard's worth of pressure treated lumber, a full bag of concrete, and an inline skate. One of the church volunteers stopped for a minute at one of the three trash trucks on standby to catch his breath and look over the filthy haul.  Holding a multi-pronged hook attached to a sturdy nylon line, he remarked, "Just to get to that trash, we had to pull out other pieces of trash first.  It took us about 45 minutes just to get to that baby pool.  There's just layers of trash out there."

I think that volunteering time today for the cleanup really brought the message home to the girls that it's vitally important to protect our waterways. The girls also got a sense of how long it takes for trash to decay after fishing out several old pieces of trash.  Madeline mentioned that she found a can that "looks just like the one my dad has at home that's like the ones he used to drink as a kid." They saw firsthand how easily trash ends up in our waterways, and how much effort it takes to clean up after other people have been careless. It was hard work today, but soooo worth the newly-clean waterway and the important lesson learned.