Cleanup crews remove old cars, needles from Merrimack River
Divers, boat crews and a massive crane pulled together to remove two rotting, abandoned cars from the Merrimack River yesterday — an operation one environmental advocate said is crucial to improving the quality of a vital water source.
“There’s 600,000 people drinking from these waters, so it’s very important we get these cars that are seeping out oil or breaking down the seats and batteries,” said Rocky Morrison, president of the nonprofit Clean River Project. “They are slowly breaking down into the waterway, so it’s very important to get all this stuff out of the water.”
Morrison and his team arrived early yesterday morning along the riverbank in Lawrence. Divers had been scouting the area for several weeks, he said. Thanks to sediment kicked up from the river bed, divers have to work in the murk and use sonar to locate the cars, Morrison said, but often a diver just has to bump into a car to find it.
Before the cars can be hauled up, some of the silt has to be washed out of the interior to make them easier to lift.
Once a diver had marked and pre-hooked the cars, a large crane rolled in and pulled them up one by one from the river bottom. After they were dropped on shore — rusted out and caked in mud — police officers checked the vehicle identification numbers to see whether any of the cars matched up with any reported lost or stolen.
“They could be dumped for insurance reasons,” Morrison said. “Sometimes we pull out vehicles that are really nice and there are mysterious reasons why they’re in there, they are not reported stolen, and they are in there. Those are red-flagged when they are pulled out.”
Yesterday’s haul included a mid-1970s Ford LTD and a 1999 minivan last registered in 2006. The operation was made possible by a state environmental grant and Morrison is hoping for a 30-day extension to retrieve as many as seven other cars in the river in that area. Weather-related delays and runoff that has made the water cloudier and increasingly unmanageable have slowed the progress, he said.
Morrison has also found a growing number of needles — more than 1,000 in the past two years — which he blames on the region’s escalating heroin crisis. He said he believes they end up in the river from street drains or from homeless camps along the water, and he’s afraid people will “start stabbing themselves or accidentally stepping on them.”
Morrison started the Clean River Project in 2005 and said he has recovered more than 70 cars and nearly 10,000 tires since his organization began efforts to clean out the river. In addition to the cars that were clustered together in the river in Lawrence, Morrison said there is a group of seven cars in the water near the Dracut line and three more closer to Methuen that still have to be pulled up.
“The keys are usually still in the ignition,” he said, “but usually they are pretty clean except for the mud. But you never know what we’ll find.”