On Saturday, Oct. 4, three National Honor Society members attended the 2014 Jefferson City Missouri River Cleanup held by Missouri River Relief. After hearing about the event through NHS president senior Graham Ratermann, seniors Sydney Mulholland and Matt Troyer volunteered and earned points for NHS.

“I thought it would be interesting to do the cleanup around the river,” Troyer said. “I have done it before around creeks in Columbia, but the river in Jeff City is a different animal and thought it would be fun.”

Even though the NHS group was small, their numbers didn’t detract from the cleanup because there were lots of other volunteers, Mulholland said. However, after the rainy weather this week, Missouri River Relief cancelled the river part of the clean up as a safety precaution against the fast-rising Missouri River, according to riverrelief.org.

“We were put in groups and each group went to a different location that was near the river and we cleaned up all the different types of trash that we found,” Mulholland said. “Because of the rain we weren’t able to go out on the boats and clean in areas directly on the river, so we went to areas where the trash there could end up in the river.”

The rain made it difficult to get to access points, Troyer said, so the groups had to go to locations further from the river where trash goes when the water goes above the levies.

Mulholland, Troyer and Ratermann went with a group of other volunteers to Turkey creek, a tributary of the Missouri River.

“There was a lot of work to do. One thing I thought was interesting was our guide told us about how there was still some trash left over from the great flood of ’93,” Troyer said. “We probably found 40-50 tired and anything from little kitty couches to skateboards.”

By the end of the day, each member had worked five hours and earned five points towards the volunteer hours required by NHS, Ratermann said, and there may be another opportunity to participate in a river clean up in the spring.

“If NHS did another clean up I would do it because going out on the boats sounded fun but we didn’t get the opportunity to do that,” Mulholland said. “I think because this project was brought up on such short notice not that many NHS people could go.”
By Emily Franke