Volunteers make Brewer cleanup a success
Monday, May 23, 2005

BREWER - Volunteers scoured the shoreline of the Penobscot River and along Main Street on Saturday picking up trash, but sometimes the plastic bags weren't large enough for what they discovered.

In addition to the usual cigarette butts, broken bottles, papers and other materials that could be recycled or thrown out at home, these environmentally conscious volunteers found refrigerators, a hot water heater, shopping carts and a washing machine as they worked their way from Eddington to Orrington.

As part of the city's efforts to comply with federal storm water discharge licensing, an estimated 170 people turned out to help with Brewer's first effort to curb the discarded garbage that usually makes its way into the Penobscot River.

"At some point, almost all of it will end up in the storm drain catch basins, or if it's in a ditch a heavy rain will wash it to the river," Ken Locke, Brewer's director of environmental services, said Saturday.

Once in the river, it dirties the water and decomposes, releasing chemicals and reducing oxygen necessary for aquatic life to survive, he said.

As an example of other life that relies on a healthy river, one Brewer resident who was watching the cleanup and did not want to be identified said he had recently seen a pair of bald eagles hunting alewives during low tide in a nearby bay.

Brewer is one of 28 municipalities that were licensed by the federal government and permitted to discharge storm water - in Brewer's case, into the Penobscot River.

Locke said the city has been discharging its storm water into the river for centuries. It's just now that state and federal environmental authorities are taking a good look at what is making its way into the river and how to reduce it.

Part of that includes increasing awareness of the public and getting people involved and showing that anyone can make a difference, organizers of the cleanup said.

That became clear to Girl Scouts Katie Davenport, 10, of Holden, Jade Bickford, 11, of Eddington and their friend Stephanie Good, 11, of Orrington, who found that one discarded cigarette butt may not seem like much, but they can add up.

If everyone traveling on Main Street threw one out, the result would be, in the words of Davenport, "big piles of cigarette butts."

The girls admitted they didn't like the prospects of swimming in polluted water or relaxing in a park where there is garbage strewn about.

The many volunteers came from both inside the city and out.

Even though Davenport and Bickford's Girl Scout Troop 52 is from Eddington and Clifton, troop leader Eric Johns, 43, of Clifton, said that doesn't mean responsibility stops at the town line. Brewer and Bangor are hubs of activity where people shop, go to work or pass through in their motor vehicles.

"We all drive into Brewer to go shopping, so this is just actually keeping the area that we use clean," Johns said.

Some volunteers came from farther away. About two dozen people showed up from as far south as Kittery after Brad Wing, 47, of Brewer posted Saturday's event on an Internet bulletin board for geocaching aficionados like himself who use Global Positioning System receivers and computers to locate objects as a hobby.

Some used the GPS satellite devices to locate the Brewer Auditorium, the starting place of the cleanup.

Locke said that it might be days before they can assess how much garbage was removed, but he indicated that numbers weren't needed to determine whether they made a difference or not.

"If we were to rate this, I would say this is a huge success," he told the volunteers who gathered at the Brewer Auditorium for the conclusion of the event.

A copyright article from the Bangor Daily News, Monday, May 24, 2005.