Great American Cleanup: Sprucing up for Tricentennial

Apr 17th, 2002

By JEAN LAKEMAN HELMS
Staff Reporter

Time to clean up the city, folks, because company's coming.

The 13th annual Great American Cleanup is going on this month, just in time for the summer vacation season and the city's 300th birthday, said Bob Haskins, head of Keep Mobile Beautiful.

"It's a chance for everybody to get out and help pick up the litter," Haskins said. "We know that there are people out there who are irritated by it."

Mobile County is littered with everything from cigarette butts to discarded furniture, Haskins said. Some of it got there accidentally, perhaps by being blown out of a truck bed on the highway, but some of it was deliberately dumped, Haskins said. Either way, he said, it's ugly.

The cleanup, formerly known as the Bag-A-Thon, has already drawn volunteers from as far away as Korea, Haskins said. The Caribbean Mercy, a hospital ship docked in Mobile this week, sent crew members out to plant flowers at a recycling center.

BellSouth employees and members of the Mobile Area Association of Realtors are helping to identify areas that need cleaning as they travel around the city on their jobs, Haskins said. Those areas will be cleaned by special "Target Teams," named in honor of Target stores, a national sponsor.

Other volunteers will be asked to pick up litter in their neighborhoods, around their businesses, schools, churches, or in areas around town that are heavily littered.

On Monday, Haskins said, he got a call from a church-bus driver in Wilmer who wanted to organize the children he drives to church to help pick up along the roadways they travel. The manager of the Hampton Inn on Beltline Highway is asking other businesses in that area to clean up and trim grass along the busy thoroughfare, Haskins said.

John Gavin, Mobile's litter abatement and neighborhood coordinator, said he usually enlists people who are serving sentences through the Community Corrections Center to clean up neighborhoods.

"We'll blitz a particular neighborhood," he said.

Gavin said he will coordinate that with local Cleanup activities organized by Keep Mobile Beautiful this month.

This weekend, he said, he will have eight to 10 workers cleaning litter and trash.

The cleanup runs through April 30.

(Mobile Register Staff Reporter Steve Myers contributed to this report.)