The Tireless Project: Cleaning Up Our Rivers

Over the past seven years, 29-year-old Danielle Crumrine has unearthed plastic dolls, car parts, dislodged parking meters stripped of quarters, factory gears, even firearms.

On the warm and sunny afternoon, Crumrine is dressed in rubber waders and a tie-dyed shirt, talking distractedly as she grabs a rope with her weatherbeaten gardening gloves. The rope stretches up a 30-ft. wall of corroded industrial steel, which rises from the bank of Monongahela River to the Southside riverfront trail.

She’s standing on a rock-strewn concrete dock, long forgotten and spattered with broken glass. Above her, volunteers for the Tireless Project let the rope descend, so that Crumrine can fill the attached bucket with rusted metal and old nails. She throws a dismembered wheel onto the rocks, then ties it to the rope and signals her colleagues to raise it carefully from the inlet.

“This shoreline is substantially cleaner than it used to be,” she says. “It used to be a disaster.” Today, the Tireless Project will collect approximately one ton of discarded tires and sundry litter. The Project is a green-up collaborative effort headed by PA CleanWays and funded by a grant from American Water, a state environmental group. The CleanWays volunteers will spend the second Fridays and Saturdays of each summer month collecting garbage, stuffing it into Hefty bags, and tossing them into proper receptacles, including ones for recycling.

During her AmeriCorps days, Crumrine would visit the undersides of Pittsburgh bridges, gathering bag after plastic bag of trash. “The garbage that’s in these rivers is unbelievable,” she says, shaking her head. Even today, after so many years of cleaning, the team is struggling to salvage three fully functional Giant Eagle shopping carts, which are stuck just beyond the depth of their waders. For this task, they call in a 20-foot barge which floats along on two pontoons. This is the year’s first outing for the CleanWays boat, and the engine has had trouble starting, but within a half-hour, the carts have been dragged from the water and carried away.

The urban shore line has its unique range of dangers: The Tireless volunteers are asked to wear tennis shoes or boots with solid arch support; they are supplied with solvents for poison ivy, which sprouts up all through the woods and bushes. Exposed nails and broken glass are to be avoided and visitors are strongly encouraged to get tetanus shots.

“You’ve got to be pretty fearless to come out here,” Crumrine says. She recounts an anecdote about a newspaper reporter, wearing dress shoes and slacks, who struggled to follow her along a swampy watershed.

The most peculiar danger of all is all too human: Rivers are a preferred gathering point for some homeless people, who often build hidden camps under the cover of bushes. What may appear to be a pile of rubbish and a sleeping bag may belong to such a person, and taking away a bottle of Gatorade could bear heavy consequences. “We’re very sensitive about what we take with us,” Crumrine says.

The Way of CleanWays

As told by Crumrine and organization president Shannon Reiter, PA CleanWays has an almost mythic origin: In the early 1990's, Sue Wiseman, a resident of Westmoreland county and avid equestrian, used to ride her horse along a riding path near her house. After a time, her horse would refuse to venture beyond a certain point, cutting Wiseman’s ride short.

As it turned out, the horse scented an illegal dumping ground, where tons of toxic chemicals had contaminated the woods and watershed. Infuriated by the discovery, Weisman began to petition her neighbors, and then the state, to help protect Pennsylvania’s forests and waters. The result, PA CleanWays, is operated autonomously in each county. Technically Crumrine’s Allegheny County branch, established in 2000, is an “affiliate,” which grants them a lot of leeway in their approach.

The Tireless Project is unique to Allegheny County, and has its own origin: In 2002, a writer named Nat Stone decided to paddle a canoe from New York City to New Orleans. When he reached Pittsburgh, he was horrified by the garbage build-up – especially the number of dumped tires – and created the Tireless concept, which officially started in 2004. Originally spearheaded by the Three Rivers Rowing Association, the Project and its funding are now handled by PA CleanWays of Allegheny County.

CleanWays does not operate alone, though: The organization partners with Venture Outdoors, Friends of the Riverfront, the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association, the Riverlife Task Force, TRRA and REI. The Project has received funding from a variety of sources, including the Heinz Endowments, the Sprout Fund, the Three Rivers Regatta, and the Western Pennsylvania Watershed Program, among others. A Steering Committee, attended by representatives of all these organizations, decides on clean-up times and locations. Forthcoming clean-ups include Duck Hollow on Aug. 3 and week-long wrap-up of many locations from Sept. 8-15. Interested folks can e-mail tirelessfridays
@hotmail.com for information. 

For such an ambitious endeavor – to walk and clean a half-dozen slated sites throughout the Three Rivers region – the Tireless Project requires very few supplies: A dozen boxes of trash bags, work gloves, a stretch of nylon rope and a few buckets. The boat (officially called the Anna Hubbard) is handy for bigger loads, but not always necessary.

What’s taxing is the actual trudging through lagoons and inlets, clinging to tree limbs and scaling boulders. Today the 40 volunteers have covered nearly 10 miles of waterfront, working as individuals and in small groups to gather as much of the larger contaminants as possible – in one case, a brand-new, fully-functional Coke machine that had been dumped, most likely, by burglars.

With so many people involved, stretched out over such a distance, Crumrine had to be vigilant to keep the clean-up organized. “My phone doesn’t stop ringing,” she says. Because the Project’s budget is so slight, Crumrine must use her own minutes on her own cell phone. Last year, she dropped her phone in the water, shorting it out and losing contact with all of her colleagues. She takes every precaution against the same accident this year. “It’s the only way we can communicate,” she says.

Crumrine’s volunteers hail from all over Pennsylvania and the world: One volunteer is from Chile, and another is Palestinian. There are VISTA volunteers and enthusiastic young environmentalists. When a smoker makes sure to toss his butt in one of the trash bags, a volunteer and ex-smoker says in a serious tone: “Thank you for not littering. We really appreciate it.”

As for the trash itself: The City of Pittsburgh arranges a rendezvous with the Tireless volunteers, where they pick up the collected garbage and haul it away. Most of the tires are too worn and muddy to be processed, and they are transported to landfills with other waste. But recyclable materials, such as aluminum cans and glass bottles, are packaged separately.

The grassroots nature of PA CleanWays helps incubate close relationships and a directed-yet-informal community. “People get more and more invested,” Crumrine says. “Someone will volunteer to create a MySpace page, or someone will solicit for bands.”

Today, thanks to Crumrine’s generous spirit, the four-hour clean-up caps off with pizza party and a keg of beer beneath the Birmingham Bridge. As the sun dwindles on the horizon, the Smut Project, a local garage rock band, starts a sound-check. When the drummer calls to inform his band-mates that traffic will delay him for another 20 minutes, one of the volunteers, a spunky young woman, offers to play percussion until he arrives.

It has been a productive day for the CleanWays crew, but true to their organization’s name, the Tireless volunteers have energy left to talk, eat, and clap each other on the backs as the river quietly drifts past.

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Robert Isenberg is a freelance writer and actor. He is co-author of the Pittsburgh Monologue Project.

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Captions:

Volunteers

Danielle Crumrine

Riverside garbage

Clean-up

Crew practice

All photgraphs courtesy of PA Cleanways of Allegheny County except "Danielle Crumrine," copyright Jonathan Greene, and "Garbage" and "Crew" copyright Brian Cohen.