Bread and Cheese Creek Volunteers Clear Storm Damage

On a routine stroll along Bread and Cheese Creek on Saturday, local environmentalist John Long discovered that a large tree had fallen across the stream, nearly completely blocking water flow.

"I couldn't see at the time that it had taken two other trees with it," Long, founder of Clean Bread and Cheese Creek, said Monday. "But the water was almost completely blocked, and it would have had to travel around the tree and up the banks to get by — there would have been substantial erosion."

Nearby properties could also have been flooded if the trees remained in place, he said.

Long put out an emergency email to volunteers and posted a plea for help on the organization's Facebook page to organize a last-minute cleanup for Sunday.

Ten volunteers answered the plea and the chainsaws ran from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday to cut up the trees and remove them from the creek.

One of the trees was an oak, which was "ridiculously dense and took forever to cut up even with the chainsaw," Long said. "We had to cut the trees into small enough pieces that we could carry them out of the creek."

It's Long's guess that the drought caused the trees' roots to shrink, and then a heavy rain storm with gusting winds knocked the trees down.

"When the roots shrink, the trees have less of a hold on the ground, and their canopies act like sails in the wind, making it easier to topple them," Long said.

While the volunteers were on site, they also picked up trash in a never-ending effort to keep the creek clean.

"We found another shopping cart — it seems like we can't do a cleanup without finding at least one cart," Long said.

He praised Sav-A-Lot stores for adopting quarter locks on their carts. Long is convinced that the small token fee to "rent" a cart works as an incentive for shoppers to return carts to the store.

"I even see kids running around to get carts off the parking lot and returning them to get the quarters," he said.

Most carts found in the creek come from Walmart and Giant stores, Long said.

If those two chains would adopt the quarter locks, he is convinced far fewer carts would clog local waterways and wooded areas.

"It sounds like a really small thing, but people want their quarter back, and they're better about returning the carts."