Sacramento volunteer organization removes over 1 million pounds of trash from waterways in 13 months
SACRAMENTO - It's not a business, it's not even a nonprofit, it's a completely volunteer-driven organization that dedicates its free time to cleaning up our waterways. River City Waterway Alliance officially formed in January last year, and they've already made loads of progress.
Between homeless encampments, your everyday litterers and the atmospheric rivers, this volunteer group has had a lot on their plate lately. They're racing to get problem areas cleared before storms roll in but they say they do it not for aesthetic reasons, but for our ecosystem. The beautification is just a side product.
"If they can't make it up Steelhead Creek, then there's no spawning," says the vice president of Sacramento Area Creek Council, Dr. Roland Brady.
River City Waterway Alliance is a volunteer organization that is committed to cleaning up our waterways.
"Ultimately, all of this debris, the floating debris, washes down Steelhead Creek and it enters into the Sacramento River and out to the delta and out into the ocean," Dr. Brady said.
And that's exactly what they're trying to prevent. Debris from homeless camps forms armored layers on the bottom of our waterways. Dr. Brady, who has a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from UC Davis, says the most problematic debris is textiles like sleeping bags, tents and tarps.
"That does two things. One, it prevents organisms that live in the sand and the mud in the bottom of the channel from getting down there because they can't burrow through all of this armor and the other is it prevents oxygen from getting into the substrate during periods of high flows," Dr. Brady said.
"I found over 100 shopping carts in the actual channel," says co-founder of River City Waterway Alliance David Ingram.
Ingram said they recently pulled 112 shopping carts from the Natomas channel. Large objects like that come with their own problems.
"A shopping cart that gets in the channel will trap debris then plants will grow on that debris and form a little island," Dr. Brady said.
"Most people don't understand how bad it really is," Ingram said. "Not necessarily so visible to the naked eye."
Even a small debris dam can take more than an hour to clean up.
"We don't ever see children playing along our creeks or waterways because it's unsafe for them," Ingram said.
The group comes across thousands of needles and batteries in the water. But since the group formed in January last year, they've already hauled away 1.2 million pounds of garbage during 350 cleanup outings.
"We want to not only restore the habitat for ecological reasons, for the wildlife and the fish, but we also want to bring these parkways back so they can used by the residents who live here," Ingram said.
According to Dr. Brady, our banks are well designed to allow high waters to spread out laterally and not erode during storms like an atmospheric river, but with the number of homeless encampments, the soil is compacted up to five times more than normal. So when that water rises, it has trouble infiltrating the soil and in turn, increases the risk for flooding and erosion.
River City Waterway Alliance's next clean-up efforts will be this weekend.
