Great American Cleanup - Many Thanks To All

Good Morning Fellow NCTr's:

As you can see from these photos we had a very successful Great American Cleanup of PA event yesterday morning and there are many people to thank for making it all come together. I'll start with the on-the-scene-crew from yesterday morning, who in a period of about two and a half hours managed to pull about 140 tires, a couch, a recliner, four or five televisions, and a pile of other trash out of the water and mud and got it ready for proper disposal. Thanks goes out to David Wright, Jim Houk, the McLaughlins - Tom and Adam, Jim Rarick, Lee and Eleanor Fairbanks, and Dennis Garrett for making the trip out and taking some Watt's Mill mud home with them.

You're aware that disposing of the tires presented a special financial challenge this year, and there was really no point in piling them up alongside the road unless we had a way and the means to dispose of them. The response to our appeal for financial support was tremendous, which allowed us to go forward with the project knowing that we had a resolution. A big thank you to Lori Macom, Julie Meier, Diane and Jack Manning, Dwight Fox, Tammy Veloski, Cody Magill, Boyd and Sharon Brewer, Joe Hardisky, Marsha Bennetti, Omie Svetlick of Sooper Dogs in Darlington, Precision Specialty Fastener of Cannellton, and Lora Woodward of Venture Outdoors. Venture Outdoors, I wanted to point out, gave us a $200 Site Improvement grant through their organization's donation program. Altogether we had $460 dollars pledged to tire disposal on this project!

Several of you have asked if we had enough money to take care of the tires we found down in the swamp. The answer is, "Yes, we think so." A thank you goes out to Donielle Andrus and Jerry Zona of Beaver and Lawrence Counties for the help they and their agencies gave us in finding a disposal solution at a cost we could work with. The cost we were given is $2 for a car tire, $3 for a tire on a rim, and $10 per tractor trailer tire. It looks like, tentatively, based on what we could figure out in the rain yesterday morning, that we have twenty-five truck tires and about 115 car tires with three or four of them on a rim. We'll have a total cost once we get them transported to the disposal facility in Bessemer. If we don't have the total amount in pledges we are certainly within a manageable figure on it.

I wanted to mention that PennDot, through the Great American Cleanup Program, supplied us with garbage bags and work gloves, and will be hauling away the trash from the site. They'll also be taking the garbage we picked up in Lawrence County last week. Thanks goes out to Kathy Guthrie of the Beaver County PennDot Office for her help. And Darlington Twp gave us safety equipment to use - safety cones, signing, and flags - so I felt "official" and none of us got run over yesterday morning. Much appreciated.

Lastly, I want to thank Lee Fairbanks and Dennis Garrett for all the work they put in on getting this together over the past ten days. They wore out shoe leather and the tires on their own vehicles, used up copier ink cartridges, burned up the phone lines, taxed their internet connections in sending emails, and talked to a BUNCH of people to get answers to questions and solutions to problems. Wouldn't have happened without their efforts.

Thanks again to everyone for your support and all that you do.

Dave Brewer
Trail Work Coordinator