|
|
| Missouri
River Cleanup...What can you do to help? |
OmahaRiverFront.com
by Nancy
Neurohr |
|
Published
Tuesday - October 23, 2001
 |
| The
following information was provided to us by Theresa Byrne who
is an Enron employee that has volunteered to work on the
Missouri River Clean Up Project. OmahaRiverFront.com
plans to be a part of this effort and will provide you with
additional information on what you can do to help. We hope
everyone who uses and enjoys our inland waterways will make a
personal commitment to help keep our rivers clean. |
|
For
the past five years, Chad Pregracke has been waging a
one-man crusade against pollution along the banks of the
Mississippi River. Using volunteer labor and funds obtained from
local businesses, the 26-year-old has cleaned more than 1,200
miles of riverbank. In the process, he has hauled over 500 tons
of trash.
Where did the abundance of rubbish come from? Some of it comes
from floods. It also comes from intentional dumping. In many
counties and small towns near the banks of the river, there are
no planned recycling or waste programs, and the cost to dump
garbage is steep. So some residents find an easy and cheap
alternative - they roll the trash off the back of their truck at
the local boat ramp. It becomes an "out of sight, out of
mind" situation. From there, the rubbish goes downstream
into someone else's backyard - until extraordinary people such as
Chad come in and clean it up.
"I have always been tied to the Mississippi River. I grew up
on its shores and worked on its water. As a commercial shell
diver for six years, I spent eight to 10 hours a day on the
bottom of the river in pitch-black water. I had to crawl and feel
my way around to collect oysters into bags, which were then sold
to the cultured pearl industry in Japan." Chad says.
"During that time, my brother and I would live on river
islands. We'd come to what we thought was a pristine spot to set
up camp. Then we'd find a discarded washing machine or television
set. You name it, it was out there. The floods had taken piles of
refuse to the more remote areas. The more waste I found, the more
I wanted to do something about it."
 So
Chad began the crusade to clean up the Mississippi and has no
intention of stopping there. In his campaigns, his crew and
volunteers cleaned up a 273-mile stretch of the Illinois River
starting at Grafton, Illinois on the southwest side of the state
where the Mississippi and Illinois rivers meet; a 14-mile stretch
of the Des Plaines River, ending at Joliet near Chicago and a
200-mile stretch of the Ohio River. And now, Chad plans to help
with cleanup efforts on the Missouri River.
When Northern
Border Pipeline
(NBPL), an affiliate of Enron,
in Omaha read the Quad City Times' stories about Chad's campaign,
they approached Enron management to approve a contribution to his
organization, the Mississippi
River Beautification and Restoration Project.
The NBPL has businesses near the Mississippi River. Then better
yet, Enron brought Chad and his boats here to the Missouri River
on Tuesday, October 16th.They performed a test run for a
community cleanup project they plan to do next year on this
portion of the Missouri River.
 With
Chad, a member of his crew and 12 volunteers from Enron, this
group managed to haul more than 2700 pounds of trash off the
Missouri River over approximately a 10-mile stretch. Some of
those items included a refrigerator, barrels, tires, chairs and a
car top and that doesn't even include the huge garbage sacks they
filled with hundreds of pounds of other trash.
Chad said that cleaning the banks of the Missouri river is a
challenge because it's faster and has steeper banks than the
Mississippi, but he plans to continue his efforts in helping to
keep our river clean. Next year, Chad and Enron will coordinate a
larger clean up project on the Missouri River. Chad said that as
long as he provides the boats to haul the trash, he just needs
volunteers to help with the clean up and other boaters to
volunteer their boats in order to transport workers to the
various banks that are marked by him prior to the cleanup
This year, Matt Sain, from Central Body Co, Inc. took the
Enron volunteers around in his 16 person Pontoon Boat which he
keeps at the Dodge
Park Marina.
Since they expect a larger group of volunteers next year, more
boaters will be needed to assist in the transportation efforts.
For more information, please visit Chad's website at www.cleanrivers.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
