Volunteers show up to clean up Marion Reservoir

         

MudPuppies Stream Team #2642 held its 18th annual cleanup on the Cottonwood River and Marion Reservoir on Saturday. Thirty-eight volunteers in three groups covered six miles of shoreline and feeder streams, as well as both sides of the nearly two-mile-long dam.

Conditions were nearly ideal, according to cleanup day organizer Lloyd Davies with the reservoir down nearly two feet to expose shorelines, relatively light winds, and temperatures starting in the low 30s and rising to the low 60s during the 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. event. Volunteers filled 71 bags of trash, removed five barrels apparently used for illegal noodling of flatheads, three tires, a discarded window AC unit, a wooden target, an arrow, 25 fishing lures, corrugated culvert pipe, three 55-gallon drums, and hundreds of spent shotgun shells. Special emphasis was made for volunteers to collect spent and discarded fishing line that injures birds and other wildlife.

The Marion Reservoir Cleanup Day has been held every year since 2002 but was canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 and 2021. Flooding in 2019 and a three-year hiatus in pickups created a lot of concentrated trashy areas. Because of windy conditions in 2017 and 2018, the dam itself had not been targeted for cleanup in five years.

Volunteers, including the Alexanderfeld Youth Group, walked the entire length of the dam on both sides, collecting 25 lures for keepsakes. Volunteers from Morningstar Youth Group concentrated on the causeway and Broken Bridge area on the northwest end of the reservoir. Additional volunteers walked all the fishing areas in the north Cottonwood area, focusing on recent controlled burn areas and debris lines left over from the 2019 flooding.

The annual cleanup day is sponsored by Great Plains Computers & Networking and MudPuppies #2642 with additional sponsorship from the Missouri Department of Conservation Stream Team program, Tampa State Bank, Thrivnet and the Army Corps of Engineers. Section leaders and managers were Jenny and Barry Montgomery, Lloyd and Nicholas Davies, Marissa Jacobson and Aaron Springer of the Corps.

More from Hillsboro Free Press
Deaths, August 12, 2015
? BERNICE SCHICK BROADSTREET, 97, retired co-owner of a photography studio in...
Read More