FLORENCE – Chad Pregracke and his crew are headed downriver as this story is being posted. They’ve been in town since last Friday, spending long hours on Lakes Pickwick and Wilson collecting flotsam and shoreline junk and piling it on their barge. The junk they collected as part of the Living Lands & Waters project amounted to well over a ton of plastic; propane and freon tanks; porta-potties; dolls, tires… It will be sorted, recycled, disposed of in an environmentally responsible way, never to pollute out shorelines again.
Besides the cleaning of the two lakes in The Shoals, the Living Quarters and Classroom portion of the barge was host to numerous students and adults. Seminars were conducted that taught best practices for responsible uses of the river for fishing and recreation. (Leave your plastic bottles in the boat.) In the evenings, folks came by the barge to hear a talk about the geological history of North Alabama by renowned geologist Dr. Jim Lacefield.
In all, this visit by the Living Lands & Waters was a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence.
At the closing ceremony, Pregracke, Alabama Mountain Lakes, TVA, Tennessee Riverkeeper, and Keep Tennessee Beautiful, all partners in this tour, expressed how important the Tennessee River is in the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who reside in it’s watershed. Every speaker at the podium expressed the critical nature of clean water and the huge economic impact the river creates, not to mention the incalculable addition to our quality of life along the shorelines.
The barge is now headed downriver to Paris, Tennessee and then on down to Paducah, for the last cleanup session of the tour.
The Quad-Cities Daily was on hand for Tuesday’s closing ceremony and media conference. We present some photos from this final event of the tour.
1 comment
Although this job should be done by TVA themselves, hats off to these folks for such a wonderful cause!!