Cleaning Jordan Lake Shoreline / March 19, 2022

By Fran DiGiano, Clean Jordan Lake Shoreline

Clean Jordan Lake has organized 5 trash cleanups in past annual Durham Creek Week celebrations. Our event on March 19, 2022 was the second on Third Fork Creek where it crosses MLK Parkway. Our goal to remove trash from feeder streams before it can reach Jordan Lake. Trash gets flushed into these streams after rainfalls, the runoff being accelerated by impervious surfaces in urbanized areas such as Durham.

About 28 volunteers removed 50 bags of trash and 7 tires on three cleanup tracks covering both sides of the creek. Challenging conditions included brier patches, rocks, stream crossing and even wading to grab trash for the most ambitious of the volunteers. A limb saw and brush cutters were needed to clear a path to the creek down a steep embankment to remove an island of trash- see last photo. Trash was hauled by yard carts and by a clever system of using kayak to ferry bags across the creek back to meetup point. All the track captains did a fantastic job of handling volunteers. If interested in receiving notifications of future cleanups, please join meetup.com/helpcleanjordanlake.