Cleaning Up the Creek

The South Fork of Peachtree Creek winds through Morningside before it heads north and joins Peachtree Creek, not far upstream from the Piedmont Road bridge.  The South Fork is a prominent feature in several neighborhood parks, including Herbert Taylor Park, the new park on Zonolite, and the Morningside Nature Preserve.  More land with public access and more trails mean more people getting upset about seeing the creek used as an urban dump site.  Yesterday morning there were two clean-ups done apparently simultaneously, one at the park near Zonolite and one at the Morningside Nature Preserve.  

Iain and I went to the clean-up in Morningside, which was arranged (as we learned after we got there) by Trudy's friend Wayne through the Sierra Club, with help from Park Pride and the Morningside Lenox Park Association.  The city sent two trucks from the Parks Department, and Park Pride had a staff person there with a sign-up sheet, gloves, shovels, wheel barrows, and a cooler full of ice water.  We entered the property from the service road under the power lines on Wildwood and walked up a short distance and then down a long steep hill to get to the creek, near the new bridge.  

There we picked up cans and plastic bottles and broken glass and pulled plastic bags out the stream.  Tires were dug out (I think the total was 18), although one near the bridge that was half-submerged and impaled on a large log defied removal with the tools we had available.  And there was all kinds of trash.  There was a cooler and a large trash can and a plastic bat (the baseball kind, not the flying animal kind) filled with sand that was so heavy we thought at first it was made of wood.  There were underwear, t-shirts, at least one sock, and one woman's boot with a heel not well-suited for walking on the beach (maybe that's how it came to be in the water).

When it rains, the water can be nasty, due (as I understand it, anyway) primarily to sewer overflows upstream in Dekalb County.  But yesterday it looked pretty good, and there were lots of small fish in sheltered areas of the stream.  We saw a frog and a salamander, both of which are pretty good indicators that the water can't be too bad.

At the same time, another crew was working in the area near Zonolite.  First there's access, then there's trails.  People like being able to walk through green space alongside a creek in the city.  Then there's stewardship and the expectation that someone upstream will do what they need to do to clean up the water.  Then there's advocacy.  That's the plan, anyway, and at least yesterday morning, it looked to me like it was working.