Norris Lake cleanup collects 107 trash bags, fills 30-yard dumpster
Sara Sizemore and Melody Tharp, volunteers in Saturday’s Norris Lake cleanup event, carry some trash from a pontoon boat to a dumpster at the Anderson County Park. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
She said 33 volunteers turned out for the cleanup efforts that began at the park’s boat launch, working from 9 a.m. until the last run arrived back at the dock around 1:20 p.m.
“Any day we can get that many volunteers out on the water and bring in that much stuff, we consider it a great success,” said Wells, director of Adventure Anderson County, the county’s tourism agency.
The trash bags were provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the dumpster was paid for by an Anderson County litter grant, Wells said.
“Besides all of the trash bags, the volunteers brought in three huge pieces of Styrofoam, along with chairs, barrels, wires, pipe, some big pieces of plastic and three tires,” she said.
One of the two boats was The Litter Gitter, owned by Walt Buttrill of Whitman Hollow, who spends much of his own free time year-round picking up litter along the Norris Lake shoreline.
His boat is rigged with a large, flat deck that can hold dozens of full trash bags. When The Litter Gitter pulled up to the dock to unload its first batch of filled bags on Saturday morning, the four volunteers on board carried 30 of them up to the dumpster.
Buttrill said he volunteered his boat and served as one of the volunteer workers for Saturday’s cleanup event.“It’s an idea I had for something to do to keep an older retired guy busy,” he said of The Litter Gitter boat. “I have collected more than 90,000 pounds of litter from around the lake.
“We seek the Styrofoam because it’s so ugly,” Buttrill said. “We take things people can’t easily collect in a garbage bag. These cleanup events are complementary to the work I do. I took 8,000 pounds of Styrofoam and miscellaneous trash from the lake over the last month.”
The volunteers at the Anderson County Park were among four crews that showed up at four separate locations on Saturday morning for the cleanup effort. The other sites were in Campbell and Union counties.
On Saturday, April 2, the Norris Watershed Cleanup will take place from 9 a.m. to noon, beginning at the Norris water plant on Lower Clear Creek Road, said Dennis Yankee, who is coordinating the event.for the Norris Watershed Board.