The Fellowship of the (Steel-Belted/Steel-Rimmed Rubber) Ring
by John Hicks-Courant
johnhc@TheWorld.com
At the end of last year, at the approximate end of paddling season, in this space I wrote:
That low-water trip last September resulted in a degree of resolve among all of the paddlers that the river hasn't seen in almost six years. That is, by the time we pulled out of the water in the Merrimack in Lawrence, a Fellowship of the (Steel-Belted-and- Possibly-Steel-Rimmed Rubber) Ring had formed. We are going to get those tires out of the last quarter of the Shawsheen River. We think it will take at least three years to get that last section of the river into the same shape as, for example, the First Meadow in Bedford and Billerica. This is how we will do it:
ƒ Frequent trips throughout the year from the Balmoral roll dam to the Merrimack
ƒ Every tire a canoe can hold will be pulled out and ferried to one of six predesignated holding areas (a kind of poor man's Transfer Station) on each and every trip, regardless of who's making the trip and how many others are with him/her.
ƒ Twice a year (tentatively August and September), we will contract with a tire-disposal enterprise to retrieve and properly dispose of the tires we've collected from the holding areas on the given date.
This process began in earnest in June of this year, when the first of a dozen tire-extraction trips were made. In the higher water of early summer, tires were ferried to depot-like spots. As the summer progressed and work continued on foot rather than from a canoe, tires were pulled from the bottom and tossed up on the bank.
The first tire-retrieval event took place on July 20th at Costello Park in Lawrence. There were about a dozen people on hand. A crew of four worked the shore, unloading boats and stacking tires. In a little less than three hours of work on July 20th, we stockpiled 183 tires from the river at Costello Park. This brought our total number of tires removed from the river in 2002 to 240.
We returned for Round Two on August 24th and pulled 250 tires from the river in less than four hours, bringing us just shy of the 500 mark before the summer is through.
The most remarkable thing about the extraction of so many tires from so short a stretch of the river is not the sheer mass of rubber. Rather it is that we can now see how much other garbage is in the river. Several of us commented on the incredible number of shopping carts in the river bottom in Lawrence. Two months ago there were so many tires in the river nobody even noticed the shopping carts.
It's likely that over the course of the next four years, we will begin to hold traditional cleanups in the Lawrence section. What I mean by "traditional" is that we extract every type of foreign material we encounter.
This year, we focused on tires to the exclusion of all else. Next year, we will focus on tires, but we will also have a dumpster for the other stuff. With any luck, the City of Lawrence will contribute a DPW truck to haul away the shopping carts, lawn mowers, bicycles, home heating-oil tank, and whatever else we find.
We have no illusions about the number of tires remaining in the river bottom. We will pull another 500 tires out of the bottom in this section of the river next year and probably the year after that, too. Each layer of discarded tires we remove lets the river dredge deeper with each successive storm.
When the water sweeps away the silt held in place by the tires we have removed, it will uncover yet another layer of tires. It is highly likely that this process will take three and possibly as many as five years to complete. It took three years in Billerica before tires became the anomaly rather than the norm. The good news is that the primary source of dumped tires in this section of the river has been apprehended by the authorities, so there is some hope that the number of new tires will decrease.
One lesson learned on these two cleanups in Lawrence, a lesson we've learned over and over again, is that the more people and boats we have focused on the cleanup, the more effective each cleanup is. We hope you'll come join us!