Volunteers clean up Penobscot Communitywide spring cleaning efforts becoming annual waterfront event

BANGOR – Various articles of discarding clothing were among the trash volunteers collected Saturday during a seven-town spring cleaning project aimed at improving the Penobscot River and its watershed.

“We picked up enough clothes to create a whole outfit,” cleanup volunteer Rhonda Murphy said Saturday after spending the morning picking up trash along the Kenduskeag Stream in Bangor.

“I’ll bet that if we’d found a mannequin, we could have dressed it,” she said, adding, “I’m surprised we didn’t find a mannequin.”

Murphy and her 15-member team from the Bangor Starbucks coffee shop were among an estimated 200 people who turned out for Saturday’s riverside cleanup, an annual event hosted for the first time last year by Brewer’s Storm Water Public Education and Participation Committee.

“For Starbucks, the community and the environment are very important to us,” Murphy said, adding that the team had been going out for the last four weekends to clean up various trouble spots in the area. She estimated that the group so far had filled 60 trash bags with litter.

Last year, 150 volunteers removed 8,000 pounds of trash from the riverfront. Because of the program’s success, it was expanded this year to include six other communities that belong to the Bangor Area Storm Water Group. Joining up this year were Bangor, Hampden, Milford, Orono, Old Town and Veazie.

The cleanup drew individuals, families, business and municipal groups, Girl Scout troops and members of nonprofit and service groups.

Members of the 101st Air Refueling Wing also helped out, along with students from the University of Maine and University College of Bangor. Participants came from as far as Augusta and Exeter.

Brewer’s storm water coordinator, Kenneth Locke, said the cleanup effort required no public tax money because it was fueled by volunteer labor and donations from nearly 20 area businesses.

He said the exact volume of trash collected won’t be known until it is weighed early this week.

“It’s really important that we do this from year to year,” Brewer Mayor Gail Kelly said during Saturday’s volunteer appreciation lunch Saturday afternoon at the Brewer Auditorium. “It doesn’t take long for [the river and its tributaries] to fill up again.”

Volunteers in Orono added a few twists to their part of the effort. Besides conducting their cleanup in the form of a scavenger hunt, organizers held drawings for 10 new bicycles and certificates for bicycle helmets, according to Bangor Area Storm Water Group coordinator Brenda Zollitsch.