Waving away gnats and batting back brush, volunteers from Cummins Inc. spent the day after Memorial Day weekend hauling a semi load of tires and enough garbage to fill a 30-yard dumpster out of a Brown County ravine.
And that was just what they could see in about a 300-square-foot area along Green Road.
The mattresses, carpets, armchairs, TVs, computer monitors and general household trash had been accumulating for years, said Cathy Paradise, a board member of Keep Brown County Beautiful. However, with this many hands, she was pretty confident they could make it all disappear within a day.
“These people, when they say they’re going to do a day of service, they really do a day of service,” she said, watching full bags of garbage and tire after tire be passed up a chain from the bottom of the ravine to a road. “They’re real workhorses. They know what they’re doing.”
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Cummins Inc. requires its employees to give at least four hours of community service every year, said Ansh Pandey, one of the coordinators of this project with Rohinish Gupta. About 70 employees signed up to help on May 29.
Pandey told Paradise they were happy to hook up with Keep Brown County Beautiful to clean up this site — because otherwise, they wouldn’t have known it existed.
“For the first, probably, 10 minutes, we kept getting surprised again and again,” he said. “Now I’m not shocked. We’re just finding a little bit of everything.”
That’s part of the problem with this area, said Paradise.
This stretch of Green Road, just north of its intersection with Upper Salt Creek Road, is so remote and uninhabited that people think no one will notice if they toss a couch or a rug or a toilet out of the back of their truck.
“It’s not OK,” Paradise said.
When people see things dumped in an area, they’re more likely to do the same, she said. That’s why cleaning up some of these longtime dump sites is important — a step toward changing the culture.
“We don’t know exactly what it’s going to take — cameras, a fence — but the landowner has been very aggressive in doing this with us and has spent quite a lot of money in getting this taken care of, so I don’t think it’ll be beyond him to do some aggressive things to try to prevent this from happening to this degree again,” she said.
Gurneesh Jatana and Shalebh Chaturvedi were walking a heavy, muck-covered mattress to the dumpster — one of several which they and others had pulled out of the ravine in the first couple hours of the day with the help of a tractor and rope.
Yes, they had chosen this avenue of service for a muggy, buggy Tuesday.
“It seemed like a good thing to do,” Jatana said.
They had also dug up and hauled out multiple carpets, license plates and a carburetor. Further down the road, at least one love seat and the parts of another were waiting for the crew to reach them.
“We usually visit Brown County, so we like it beautiful,” Chaturvedi said.
“Look at all this junk,” Jatana said.
The tires were so numerous — some buried under years of dirt — Brown County Solid Waste District Director Phil Stephens wasn’t sure they’d even fit in one trailer.
“Better than Pilates,” quipped Jessica Kuehner, who was stacking a pile almost as tall as her. “The nice thing is I’m getting a lot of steps in between the trash bin and here.”
The grand total for the day was 435 tires and 15 TVs, which were to be recycled; the rest of the trash would go to a legitimate landfill.
“Thank you, guys. Thank you,” waved a man who passed in a pickup truck.
“Thank you!” Paradise cheered back.
“This is going to be our first one, and if we’re successful — if, by doing this, we can show people this isn’t OK, don’t do this, and people can stop doing it — then we’ll do this again someplace else, because this isn’t the only one,” she said.
