Creek cleanup set for Friday
Georgia Power employees will lead the annual Renew Our Rivers event, which will be in Armuchee this year.
Volunteers and Georgia Power Plant Hammond employees will take to the banks of Armuchee Creek on Friday for the annual Renew Our Rivers cleanup program.
For many years the cleanup effort was based at Brushy Branch off Black’s Bluff Road, but the event has rotated between Brushy Branch and other locations along local waterways for the last several years.
The banks of Armuchee Creek along Scenic Drive, east of U.S. 27, have long been a favorite dumping ground for people disposing of everything from sofas to refrigerators and tires to old toys.
Rebecca Theakston, president of the Plant Hammond chapter of the Citizens of Georgia Power, said she would expect between 100 and 125 employees of Georgia Power, most of the workers at Plant Hammond along with some workers from the Rome distribution center.
The Renew Our Rivers campaign, coordinated by the Keep Rome Floyd Beautiful office and conducted each spring close to Earth Day, is an outgrowth of a Plant Hammond employees fishing tournament that morphed into a cleanup after the employees realized how much junk was in the rivers. It’s not unusual for the volunteers to haul in old boats that have been wrecked and left in the water, tires by the ton and much more.
Theakston said it is easy to get Georgia Power employees involved in the event.
“It’s something the majority of our folks look forward to all year long,” Theakston said. “They enjoy getting out and cleaning up the waterways and they like taking care of the environment. That’s very important to our employees.” She said the employees take the Georgia Power motto of being a citizen wherever we serve very seriously.
In 2015, volunteers were based out of the RomeFloyd ECO Center and conducted cleanups along all three of the primary rivers. In 2013, the group was again based out of the ECO Center and did cleanup work beneath the Norfolk Southern Railroad trestle and picked up trash along Burwell Creek, Silver Creek and Little Dry Creek. In 2011, while based at Brushy Branch, a large number of the volunteers also did work to help clean up after a tornado that blew through Cave Spring days prior to the clean-up campaign.
Friday’s cleanup will begin at 8 a.m. with a safety meeting in the parking lot of the new Armuchee Baptist Church, 5385 Martha Berry Highway. Volunteers, who will get T-shirts, breakfast biscuits and lunch, are encouraged to wear comfortable boots and long pants.
“We will need trucks and some with a winch on the front pull appliances, sofas, etc. out of the stream banks and steep ditches,” Keep Rome Floyd Beautiful Director Mary Hardin Thornton said,
People with questions about the event can reach Thornton at 706-236-4456.