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Volunteers help clean Long County
MR RiversAlive2
The Long County volunteers pick up trash.
Volunteers of all ages joined together this past weekend to help spruce up their community during the first Long County Rivers Alive cleanup.
Youths and adults alike gathered at the Long County Courthouse early to sign up and organize their groups to head out into three different directions to start cleaning up their community.
“We had people cleaning up at Johnston Landing (Altamaha River), the county boat landing near Adams Fish Camp, and out on Tibet Road,” Michelle Poppell said.
Poppell, along with Carol Brady and John Bradley of Long County Code Enforcement Office, organized the outing.
Once the groups split up, they picked up anything that wasn’t attached to the ground or natural vegetation and bagged it up.
According to Poppell, 40 people participating in the effort, including 33 youths.
All of the volunteers met at the courthouse and then were taken to their assigned areas where they worked until noon, collecting 60 bags of trash.
The crews then had lunch together with the satisfaction of knowing they helped make their county a more beautiful place.
Southland Waste Systems of Georgia, the Coastal Courier, the Keep Liberty County Beautiful campaign, Piggly Wiggly in Glenville, Joe Raymer and RMR Associates and the Long County Code Enforcement Office sponsored the event, locally.
The Rivers Alive program is a statewide waterway cleanup effort sponsored by the Department of Natural resources and the Keep Georgia Beautiful Campaign in collaboration with The Ocean Conservancy.
According to Poppell, the day was a success although there is still a need for more help.
“For this being our first time doing this, I think it went great, and I appreciate all of those who came out and helped, and I thank all our sponsors.”  
“We’ll be having another cleanup day in April with Earth Day, and we’re hoping that we can get several local groups to sponsor a highway in the county,” Poppell said.
She said with the Adopt-A-Highway Program, the goal is to have civic groups, churches, youth clubs and any other group that has the desire to clean up a street or highway in the county, four times during the year.
“The groups would clean up each side of the road and leave the bags of trash. We would make arrangements to have the bags picked up,” she said, noting, “We really need some help with this. Right now, we only have two groups who have adopted a highway - the 4-H Club and the Garden Club at the middle school.”  
All of these clean-up projects are a part of the best management practices through the state and are designed to keep Georgia beautiful.
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