Litter could pose environmental threat: Wildlife officers looking into clean-up options

By CHARLES W. JOHNSON / News Editor for the Southern Standard

TWRA officers Roy Cannon, left, and Joey Wray check out some of the plastic sheeting which appears to have been dumped from the Highway 8 bridge into the Collins River during recent flooding.

Concerns over a large deposit of plastic sheeting left hanging on trees along the shoreline of the Collins River, near the Highway 8 bridge, have lead local wildlife officers Joey Wray and Roy Cannon to try to come up with some method of cleaning up the materials.

The garbage is not only unsightly, but could end up having a destructive effect on the environment as well.

“We first noticed it after the big flood we had,” said Wray, a TWRA officer. “It looks like the white plastic sheeting that’s used in nursery operations. A lot of it has the metal clamps that fasten it to the ground that makes you think it might have been a ground cover or something. So that’s probably where it came from.”

But unlike others who think the debris may have washed down from nearby nurseries during the recent storms, Wray says it looks more like it was deliberately dumped.

“It looks like, to me, that it was thrown off the bridge,” he said, “because there’s no sign of any scrap or anything upstream from the bridge. There’s no sign of any kind of scraps or materials washing in from land to the bridge. It all begins right at the bridge, so it appears that someone during the high flood just came by and tossed it off the bridge hoping the water would carry it on down.”

But instead when the waters receded, “It was caught on the trees,” Wray said. He noted that though the worst of the debris was close to the bridge, there was material spread along the shore for more than a mile.

Whatever the source of the debris, Wray said it won’t be an easy task to remove all the garbage.

“It’s going to take quite a bit of manpower to get that cleaned up,” he said. “Some of it will be hard to clean up because it’s so high in the trees that it’ll be hard to reach.”

Wray said the officers were hoping to elicit some volunteer help from local organizations to aid in the cleanup.

“Right now we’re thinking about trying to contact maybe some Boy Scout groups or other groups who might be interested in starting a project to try to get out here one day with boats and help clean this up,” he said.

Wray said the officers hope local residents might be able to provide information to help apprehend whoever dumped the materials in the river.

Any group or organization who would like to help with the cleanup, or anyone who has information on the illegal dumping, can contact Joey Wray at 686-8972, or Roy Cannon at 815-2600, or the Crossville office of the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency at 800-262-6704.