High river keeps cleanup on solid ground

A joint river clean-up organized by the Keep Bartow Beautiful and Keep Rome-Floyd Beautiful offices morphed into a boat ramp beautification project in the wake of several days of rain, which brought the current and level of the Etowah River to a point where it was deemed impossible to launch canoes and kayaks Friday.

Personnel from Georgia Power Plant Hammond in Rome and Plant Bowen in Euharlee joined in the Renew Our Rivers project at Neel’s Landing off U.S. 411 at Macedonia Road near Kingston.

“We love these kind of things,” said Sheri Henshaw, director of the Keep Bartow Beautiful office. “We love to see interaction with our corporate partners because they are always great advocates out in the community.”

Mary Hardin Thornton, director of Keep Rome-Floyd Beautiful, said she has always enjoyed working with the Plant Hammond employees and that it was a great opportunity to meet new utility employees out of Plant Bowen.

In lieu of the cleanup, volunteers planted trees at the ramp with the assistance of Rome arborist Terry Paige.

“We’ve got an October Glory red maple, some button bushes and Swamp hibiscus, they’re all native plants,” Paige said.

The volunteers also installed an infiltration garden with Diane Minick of Canton. The garden was designed by Minick and installed near the intersection of the large parking lot and the top of the ramp itself.

“It catches run-off water and spreads it out,” Minick said. “That allows the water to stop and soak into the ground. If there is overflow, too much water, it will work its way out and through a filtering device.”

The idea is to keep trash — which inevitably gets dumped into the parking lot — out of the river.

Part of the infiltration garden includes a lot of shrubbery, including Swamp sunflower, Swamp milkweed, a Blazing star, all good pollinators to enhance natural expansion of the plantings.

Catherine Fox, principal of Fox Environmental, a stormwater management expert who serves the Greater Atlanta area, said that it was great to see the agencies in the two counties come together for the project. Fox said that issues facing Floyd and Bartow counties can be very different and that one of the biggest problems facing the smaller waterways that flow into the rivers across Northwest Georgia is the fecal matter from domestic animals.

Henshaw said an actual cleanup of debris in the river and along the riverbank could possibly be rescheduled for sometime later in the year.

ABOVE: Berry student Jake Hager (left) carries a plant for installation in an infiltration garden at Neel’s Landing.

LEFT: William Lee of Adairsville does a little fishing Friday in the Etowah River — which was too high for the planned canoe/kayak cleanup — while others were working to beautify the Neel’s Landing boat ramp off U.S. 411.

Photos by Doug Walker, RN-T BELOW: Diane Minick, of Stormwater Landscapes in Canton, pulls some shrubbery out of her truck at Neel’s Landing.

Doug Walker / RN-T Rome arborist Terry Paige inspects a tree waiting to be planted Friday as part of an infiltration garden at Neel’s Landing on the Etowah River off U.S. 411. The planting was part of a joint Renew Our Rivers event with the Keep RomeFloyd and Keep Bartow...