By Mike Isbell
University of Georgia

Don't think for a moment that the junk the "Rivers Alive" volunteers cleaned out of West Point Lake came downstream from Heard County.

It may have passed through here, but the vast majority of it didn't come from here. Most of it came from somewhere upriver from here.

Heard County had its own Rivers Alive cleanup. With the help of Georgia Power's Plant Wansley, we had quite an army of volunteers working back-to-back weekends.

We were cleaning up our part of the Chattahoochee, and that should keep a whole lot of stuff from ever reaching West Point Lake.

Many experts say the Chattahoochee River is the natural resource of greatest economic importance in the Southeast, after the Mississippi River.

River in peril

But it's a river in peril.

The late professor emeritus of ecology at the University of Georgia, Eugene Odum, once said, "The Chattahoochee is an endangered river, short and simple. With few exceptions, no other major metropolitan area in the world has to depend on such a little river for its existence."

Environmental regulations are helping clean up single-point sources of pollution. But many problems in Georgia's streams are the result of nonpoint sources.

Litter and other debris continually washes into our streams and rivers. This process of debris loading from upstream has resulted in serious impacts to the Chattahoochee and to West Point Lake.

Rivers alive

Rivers Alive is a statewide effort using volunteers to clean up Georgia rivers and streams. All together, 19,000 volunteers devoted 70,000 hours to cleaning 1,105 miles of streams in Georgia this year.

The state had more than 180 Rivers Alive cleanup events in 2003, at least 20 on the Chattahoochee. Others cleaned up sections of the Altamaha, Coosa, Flint, Ochlockonee, Ocmulgee, Oconee, Ogeechee, Satilla, Savannah, St. Mary's, Suwannee, Tallapoosa and Tennessee rivers.

A dozen 4-H clubs were among the sponsors of these cleanups in Georgia.

The Heard County Extension Service and Heard County 4-H Club collaborated with Plant Wansley on three days to remove debris from the Chattahoochee here.

Quite a haul

When they were done, the 92 4-H'ers and Plant Wansley employees and family members in Heard County removed quite a haul from the river:

• 226 industrial-size bags of trash.
• 56 tires.
• 12 appliances.
• 10 tons of metal pipe.
• 10 barrels.
• 3 dump truck loads of nothing but plain old junk
• 1 doghouse.
• 1 old truck.

It's heartwarming that all these people volunteer their time to clean up our rivers in these events. It would be better, though, if we'd all commit to being more careful about letting our junk wash into our streams in the first place.

(Mike Isbell is the Heard County Extension Coordinator with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Dan Rahn, a CAES news editor, also contributed to this article.)