Hundreds roll up their sleeves to clean up environment
Call it an Earth Day echo. A week after the annual environmental event, volunteers were still rolling up their sleeves to pick up trash, landscape, repair and paint at more than 40 locations in Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach on Saturday.
They were on waterways and beaches, in parks and neighborhoods, at libraries and urban gardens as part of Fort Lauderdale Cares Day and the first-ever Depot Days of Service.
More than 80 Office Depot volunteers kicked off their pilot project about 7 a.m. by collecting 35 pounds of trash in the 1300 block of South Ocean Boulevard in Pompano.
“We walked about a quarter-mile of the beach and stripped it clean of plastic pollution,” said Morgan Knowles, with the Youth Environmental Alliance.
“We planted 11,000 sea oats to help restore the dune system here in Pompano,” she added.
Canadian Susan Verkaik, 76, hopes it works. She spends her winters at the Claridge Condominiums near where the sea oats were planted.
“I’ve seen the beach wash away,” she said. “The water took all the sand.”
Meanwhile in Fort Lauderdale, more than 100 students from Pompano Beach and Lauderhill middle schools were pulling air potato weeds out of the ground at Snyder Park beginning about 9 a.m. to save the native vegetation from one of the most invasive and toxic plants in Florida.
Diego Rodriguez, with the Firewall mentoring program, said the students earn community service hours needed to graduate but they also learn to appreciate the outdoors.
“They get almost a completely different outlook once they get out here and into the nitty gritty,” he said. “[There’s] camaraderie with helping each other [but] there’s a good bit of competition, too.”
At Delevoe Park, the Fernandez was helping clean the lake.
“I found plastic, glass, parts from cars, and some things you can’t imagine,” said Pablo Fernandez, 17, a junior at the Sagemont School in Weston.
“This is one of the few activities that the whole family can do together,” said his father, Carlos Fernandez. “So, it helps him and we help the community as well.”
Another group of students spent morning tending the urban gardens in Northwest Gardens development. family the the
Manager Lisa Johnson has more than 2,400 earth-filled bags in five gardens growing a variety of fruits and vegetables that are harvested to feed the neighborhood residents.
“For the last four years I can say we’ve fed a couple hundred families,” she said. “I just grow it and give it.”
Johnson said it’s a year-round job but the volunteers do 90 percent of the work. “It’s very much a labor of love,” she said. For more information on how to get involved in a variety of community programs, go online to HandsOnBroward.org.
wkroustan@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4303 or Twitter @WayneRoustan