by Rotary Club of Fort Erie, May 14, 2022, VOL. 3 ISSUE 19
What do you get when you add 4 Rotarians plus 6 neighbourly Volunteers plus 19 students from FEIA plus 3 students from GFESS plus 2 sponsors all divided by 4 streets with ditches leading down to Waverly Beach Park on Lake Erie?
You get 83 bags of junk. Each bag weighs about 15 lbs., giving a final answer of 1245 lbs of garbage.
On Saturday, Apr. 23rd, the Rotary Club of Fort Erie held it’s Earth Day effort. Although Earth Day was officially on Friday, Apr. 22nd, it was necessary to hold it on a weekend to get the most volunteers. Rotary Clubs all over Ontario bordering the Lakes participated in cleaning the Earth over the week; thus, we’ll be hearing more and more the word: Earth Week.
The Great Lakes contains almost 20% of the world’s fresh water. It borders eight states and 2 provinces and has over 15,000 km of shoreline.
For Earth Week, the Rotary clubs around the Great Lakes in both Canada and the United States concentrated on cleaning the waterways of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. We call this the Great Lakes Watershed Clean up.
So far, hundreds of Rotary clubs and thousands of Rotary Volunteers have participated. We hope to grow this to all 5 lakes in future years.
We want to thank our adult volunteers for participating. We also want to thank Kathy and Dave
from Royal Lepage and Jeff Hill from Fort Erie Rona in sponsoring the effort. The rubber gloves, cotton gloves, garbage bags, and wooden poles all came in handy to get the garbage in water filled ditches. If you see garbage about 5 meters in; you can thank the polluters for throwing their garbage well into the brush that our volunteers could not reach or even get to.
We also want to thank the students from FEIA and GFESS. Without their help, we could not get 83 bags of garbage. This collaboration also allowed the students to get some hard-earned volunteer hours needed to graduate.
We are baffled that the good citizens of Fort Erie could produce so much garbage in the ditches of Dominion Rd., Kraft Rd., Helena St, and part Albany up Alfred St. all feeding into Lake Erie. We believe that the good citizens of Fort Erie do not deserve the title of polluter due to a few bad apples.
We ask people to stop throwing out your garbage out the window of your car. You may be drinking your own pollution and microplastics.
One final note. We hope that the driver of a late model dark blue BMW is feeling well. We wonder if the driver ate some rat poison and had to speed off to the hospital. Why else would the driver speed into the southbound lane on Helena to overtake a northbound car slowing down safely to ensure the safety of our volunteers picking garbage? So, if you know of an owner of that vehicle; ask if she/he’s okay.
