The Cray Anglers Conservation Group’s 20th river clean for the year took place on a this secluded strectch rich in wildlife: kingfishers, voles and owls are on the back while the river sports bream, roach, perch, pike, dace, chub, eel even the odd trout. But it’s also an area prone to fly tipping. Stolen and abandond cars are found in the river or on the bank and there’s plenty of littering and vandalism.
Cleaning up all this mess is made a bit more tricky by the fact that it’s a bit of a jungle. The steep banks are covered in dense vegetation: reed beds, willows and giant hogweed grow in abundance.
We’d had the usual site visits, risk assesment and plan for the clean up but regular heavy rains and hail storms menat the water was up, pushing through and a muddy brown colour. We put the skip up on the Friday and noted about 20 car tyres. Somehow, by Sunday Morning, when we came to do the clean up there were THOUSANDS of them, well, over a hundred!
The vegetation was crushed, branches smashed. Now we had a problem!
The stuff that we had intended to clear had to be left behind as the tyres, even stacked neatly into a 6-yard skip, left it piled way above the level load warning on the side. I lost count around 116, Then there were two shopping trolleys, a swivel chair, 9 bin bags of litter and a bike frame.
The tyres had to be loaded into a Landrover and driven several hundred metres to the skip whilst we moved the rest in wheelbarrows.
Passing tyres up a steep muddy slope, amongst smashed vegetation is very time consuming and labour intensive so we formed a chaingang to keep the momentum going.
Anyway, we did it, and it looked good. Just a shame so much litter & debris had to be left behind, however the Council, EA & police are visiting that stretch on Tuesday evening for a scrutiny check. Hopefully this will show them that, yes, we are making a difference, but without measures being taken, flytippers will continue to decimate this stretch as they have other areas.
To get involved with CACG or find out more call 07968 805 751 or email us and check out the website.
