RFE Does Math Magic
What do you get when you add 4 Rotarians plus 6 neighbourly Volunteers plus
19 students from FEIA plus 3 students from GFESS plus
2 sponsors all divided by 4 streets with ditches leading down
to Waverly Beach Park on Lake Erie?
You get 83 bags of junk. Each bag weighs about 15 lbs., giving a final answer of
1245 lbs of garbage.
On Saturday, Apr. 23rd, the Rotary Club of Fort Erie held it’s Earthday effort. Although Earthday
was officially on Friday, Apr. 22nd, it was necessary to hold it on a weekend to get
the most volunteers. Rotary Clubs all over Ontario bordering the Lakes participated in
cleaning the Earth over the week; thus we’ll be hearing more and more the word: Earthweek.
The Great Lakes contains almost 20% of the world’s
fresh water. It borders eight states and 2 provinces and has over 15,000 km of shoreline.
For Earthweek, the Rotary clubs around the Great Lakes in both
Canada and the United States concentrated on cleaning the waterways of Lake Ontario and Lake
Erie. We call this the Great Lakes Watershed Clean up. So far, hundreds of Rotary clubs and
thousands of Rotary Volunteers have
participated. We hope to grow this to all 5 lakes in future years.
We want to thank our adult volunteers for participating. We also want to thank Kathy and Dave
from Royal LePage and Jeff Hill from Fort Erie Rona in sponsoring the effort. The rubber gloves,
cotton gloves, garbage bags, and wooden poles all came in handy to get the garbage in
water filled ditches. If you see garbage about 5 meters in; you can thank the polluters
for throwing their garbage well into the brush that our volunteers could not reach or even get to.
We also want to thank the students from FEIA and GFESS. Without their help, we could not
get 83 bags of garbage. This collaboration also allowed the students to get some
hard earned volunteer hours needed to graduate.
We are baffled that the good citizens of Fort Erie could produce so much garbage in the
ditches of Dominion Rd., Kraft Rd., Helena St, and part Albany up Alfred St. all feeding
into Lake Erie. We believe that the good citizens of Fort Erie do not deserve the title
of polluter due to a few bad apples.
We ask people to stop throwing out your garbage out the window of your car.
You may be drinking your own pollution and microplastics.
Please click on “Photo Album” tab at top to see pictures.