Angel Carter has found a boat, jet skis, mattresses and safes in Arlington’s Fish Creek, mixed in with fast food bags, foam cups and illegally dumped garbage.
It was around seven years ago that Carter saw a problem with litter at Fish Creek and decided she was going to do something about it.
In 2018, the Arlington woman called up some neighbors and friends and put the word out on social media that she wanted to clean up Fish Creek, and somewhere along the way Carter ended up creating the Fish Creek Cleanup Challenge.
Now Carter is gearing up for the seventh annual iteration of the challenge, with volunteers gathering at Fish Creek on Saturday. Volunteers will flock to Fish Creek around 8 a.m., with plans to clean until around noon.
Around 1,000 people showed up that first year, working together to get the boat and jet skis from the dried creek, along with shopping carts sunk into the mud and even hot tubs, most likely left in the creek after heavy storms swept them away from the owner’s home.
Carter thinks people come back year after year because they like being a part of something bigger than themselves. There are fewer people who return each year because of burnout, she said, but that sense of making a difference can motivate a lot of people for a long time.
There’s also a sense of community that comes with it.
“There are all sorts of conversations and contacts exchanged,” Carter said. “People come back year after year and sometimes they’re looking for someone specific to work with again.”
The rush of stormwater to the creek brings with it anything the stream can carry. Lawn furniture. Roadside litter. Bumpers left on the side of the street after a crash.
And all that gets deposited in the creek when the rainfall ends, joined by things intentionally left there like microwaves and even a truck.
As Carter gears up for the seventh year of this all-volunteer effort to make part of Arlington beautiful and easier to walk around, she said things have improved to the point that the annual challenge might need to start looking to other parts of the city that need attention.
Seeing improvements
Carter walks along Fish Creek all the time. With her neon-blue hair in tight, slim braids tied up and draping down her back, she’s easy to spot on her treks through the area. What gets harder to spot each year is the pollution.
"When we first started, we had decades of litter down there,” Carter said. “I’ve seen a big difference.”
She said that where the first cleanups needed thousands of people to help. Today they can clean Fish Creek with a couple hundred people spending a few hours picking up trash.
There are always new shopping carts stuck in the mud and new litter up and down the creek, but it’s not a decade’s buildup of refuse, she said.
Still, there’s more than can be done in preventing trash buildup between cleanings, Carter said. Education is one of the biggest things that can make an impact.
Linda Finley agrees.
Finley has been involved in the cleanup efforts since the start. A code enforcement ranger for the city for 11 years, Finley lives near Fish Creek and has seen not only the pollution build up but also where it comes from.
“We have a lot of through traffic from the schools plus whenever if storms everything just sort of presses through that area,” Finley said. “It looks really bad when that happens. It’s just a constant picking up and cleaning up that has to be done there. It’s not just a one and you’re done thing. It’s something that has to constantly go on.”
There are plenty of ways trash ends up in Fish Creek, which means there are just as many ways to prevent it, Finley said.
One problem that most people don’t think about is grass clippings and leaves from Arlington homes and businesses, Finley said. Those are biodegradable, but they don’t disappear overnight.
Instead, a lot of times they end up washed away into storm drains and into the creek. And while it is true that leaves and grass clippings will eventually degrade, they still cause problems before that, clogging storm drains and building up in the creek where they stop the water from flowing and catch garbage that’s been blown or washed into the area.
What’s worse for the environment, she said, is when people simply litter.
“My husband and I saw a lady just dump trash out of her car at a stoplight yesterday,” Finley said. “Those are the things that we’re dealing with. ... There’s no rhyme or reason to it.”
That litter, like the leaves and grass clippings, blow or are washed away into the creek, adding to the litter. Taking the time to find a bin at a gas station or car wash to throw away trash is simple and just common sense, she said.
“If you had a piece of trash, would you just throw it down on the floor in your house?” Finely asked. “I guess if you do you think it’s probably OK outside, too, but most of us would not do that.”
There are citations police can give for littering, but they require an officer to see someone actually throwing their trash to the ground.
That’s where education comes in handy.
Finley tells her neighbors and other Arlington residents about where their leaves go after they’re raked or blown into the street and how they cause issues. She also tries to make sure people know what happens to trash they throw out their car windows or what happens when a trash bag is improperly disposed.
“If people are more educated about where all this trash and debris and everything goes, maybe they’ll be a bit more hesitant about throwing it down,” Finley said.
The city is also working to educate folks about how to prevent litter and pollution of Arlington’s creeks.
Both Finley and Carter said they’ve seen some improvement, too. There seems to be less trash to pick up each year, and Carter is even thinking about handing the reigns off to someone else and encouraging the Fish Creek Cleanup to move to other areas.
"We’re contemplating what we do next year,” Carter said. “Do we do the creek cleanup challenge at Rush Creek or do we do it at Johnson Creek? Do we have one here still? I think at this point Fish Creek is to a point where mainly need maintenance.”
Over the last six years, Carter and the volunteers who join her to clean the creek have pulled out more than 70,000 lbs of trash. Carter said it’s a community effort to get all that litter, debris and dumped safes and shopping carts.
When that trash is bagged up, it’s collected by volunteers from the city’s parks and recreation department who go along the creek to collect bags, according to a city spokesperson. Those bags are then dumped into two 30-yard containers donated each year by Republic Services.
But each year, Carter said volunteers have less work than the last.
Part of that is because of efforts by the city, like putting up fencing to make it harder to access parts of the creek where the worst illegal garbage dumping happens.
But Carter thinks even just volunteer efforts to clean the area can make a big difference. When people see a landscape of trash and stuff illegally dumped like tires, roofing shingles and fence parts in the area, they feel like they’re not doing any harm by adding to it.
“When it is seen and let go for so long it’s just accepted,” Carter said. “Now we’ve come in and said, ‘No, this is not acceptable.’ ”
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