Students help clean up river
By April Straughters Herald-Standard
A group of Laurel Highlands High School students got up early on a Saturday morning, in the pouring down rain, to clean up other people’s mess along Rankin Run as part of the 13th Annual River Sweep.
Senior Matt Kusniar said he was ready to roll over to go back to sleep after his alarm clock went off at 8 a.m.
But instead Kusniar, along with a group of five other high school students from the Laurel Highlands Senior School Ecology Club and Watershed Class, removed old tires, television sets, toilets, parts of trucks and pieces of large house appliances from an illegal dumpsite at Rankin Run along Vances Mill Road in Franklin Township.
“We just want to clean up the environment in Fayette County and make it a cleaner place to live,” Kusniar said. “It really disgusts me that people will dump this kind of stuff.”
The rain didn’t stop the effort, but it did slow things down a bit as volunteers slipped on a muddy hillside as they tried to carry trash up from the site.
D.J. John, a senior at LH, said he didn’t mind falling in the mud a couple of times as he tried to pull up tires.
“This is important. You can’t have this going on where you live,” he said.
Others agreed, as total of 14 volunteers from the non-profit Greater Redstone Clean Water Initiative (GRCI), the Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Pennsylvania Cleanways of Fayette County and the LH Ecology Club participated in the project.
Some volunteers, like Barbara Salitrik of Hopwood were not part of any organization and came out on their own.
Salitrik said there is no excuse for the amount of trash that was found along Rankin Run, which is a Redstone Creek tributary.
“There is no excuse for this,” she said. “A lot of this is household trash. North Union Township has mandatory garbage collection and recycling is picked up once a month. This is just pure laziness. If we don’t take pride in our county, who will?”
John Piwowar, chairman of GRCI, was pleased that people came out in the rain to help with the statewide sweep. The DEP and the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission sponsored the six-state sweep of the Ohio River Watershed.
Piwowar was especially pleased with the participation of the students.
“The highlight of the activities is that the young people take an interest. It really lifts your spirits that maybe something can be done,” he said.
Kelly Kruper, advisor of the LH club, said in order to be successful the whole initiate has to start with youths.
Bethany Sanner, who graduated from LH this year, said Kruper is really good at getting students involved.
“That’s where it starts,” Kruper said. Now, they will go home and tell their family and when they grow up they won’t do this kind of thing and they will teach their children,” she said.
Some students even brought their parents along. Jeff Palencik brought his mother, Susan and Robert Sloan brought his father, Bob.
“It’s depressing to see all this,” Susan Palencik said.
Piwowar said he hopes these cleanup initiatives educate people and motivate them to stop polluting the waters.
“The most important thing is to stop the dumping,” added Tom Douglas, a volunteer from Hopwood.
Salitrik agreed as she found batteries and old diapers.
“This is our drinking water, we bathe in this. When are people going to realize that water is recycled, it’s not renewed,” she said.
As the group finished their efforts there was still plenty of metal poles and old carpeting embedded in the dirt, with pretty wild flowers ironically sprouting through the trash heap. Kruper said there was no way they could possibly remove all the trash from the area.
“We only put a small dent in it today. We’ll be back in November,” she said.