KINGSTON SPRINGS, Tenn. — When a garbage truck crashed on Highway 70 in Cheatham County, it had the whole town talking, not just because the road was closed, but because trash was spilled all over the side of the road, and into a creek.
While the driver of the truck was injured, he is expected to be okay, but the creek itself was left filled with trash, even after a cleanup crew arrived at the scene in the evening, working to remove the trash.
“I don’t see how they saw what to pick up because it was so dark,” Pat McDonald, who works across the street at Noah’s Closet, said. “What the guys were picking up, from what I could tell, was just what was right here.”
That is one of the major issues members of the community have brought up: Cleanup crews removed most of the trash from the actual accident site, but they failed to remove the trash that was swept down the creek.
“A majority of the trash went down underneath the culvert and appeared on the other side of the road, which, it was out of sight, out of mind.” Glenn Remick, a Kingston Springs city commissioner, said on Friday, adding that much of the trash made its way to the Harpeth River.
“To have a garbage truck with a million individual pieces of trash: floating trash, sinking trash – it is so disheartening. It’s so sad, it hits you quite deep, because we love our Harpeth River. You know, Kingston Springs is the Heart of the Harpeth, that is our city motto, and to have something like this happen, it just hits you right in the heart. Accidents happen, understandably, but let’s clean up, let’s clean it up nice afterwards.”
NewsChannel 5 learned on Friday that United Waste Haulers were planning to send a cleanup crew from Evergreen AES Environmental Services to clean up the trash that was left behind on Saturday morning, and it would likely take days to clean up.
For people who study water and pollution surrounding them, they know how much of an impact trash in a small creek can have.
“That’s going to flow into the Harpeth River, it’s going to flow into the Cumberland, and the Cumberland actually connects to the Ohio River, which connects to the Mississippi, which eventually everything flows out into the Gulf of Mexico,” Gray Perry, program coordinator at Cumberland River Compact, said.
Beyond the fact that trash is unsightly and can choke creatures like turtles and dolphins, scientists believe that microplastics could have a significant negative impact on aquamarine life, in turn, having a negative impact on humans.
“The studies are only now just beginning to surface on how that’s going to impact our aquatic wildlife,” Perry explained. “My fear is that if we don’t become more proactive, we’re going to learn about the worst effects later on, and at that point, we use plastic so much in our daily lives, we’re going to have a monumental task ahead of us to clean all of this up.”
Environmentalists and scientists studying the issues encourage everyone to dispose of trash and recyclables in the correct way, not littering, and also encourage individuals to clean up trash, even if it’s not theirs, when they’re able to.
