Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There were students from a Virginia Tech ecology club; there was a Girl Scout or two. There was a mess of kids from the Christian group Young Life, and there, in the midst of it all, was Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop.
Brown work gloves shielding hands that probably spend a lot of days pushing paper, Dunlop joined the assembled to mine the hillside, an illegal landfill. Endless unknowns were extracted. Former mattresses. Skeletons of stoves. Twenty-two refrigerator pieces. Soggy stuffings of who-knows-what.
Steve Huppert and Dan Houghton, Young Life chaperones, manned the nearby trash bins. Houghton commanded the operation from his post atop an abandoned Westinghouse dishwasher.
"What is it?" he called, as a couple of young guys dragged a fading red slab toward the metal-recycling pile.
"Coke machine," they replied.
In Montgomery County, 3,000 came out for "Broomin' & Bloomin' " - not to be confused with Radford's simultaneous "Cleanin' & Greenin'."
Everybody gets up early on an April Saturday and, instead of cleaning the house, spring cleans the neighborhood.
Clean fever raged throughout the region. In Giles County, war was declared on litter.
Farther north, the Clean Valley Council orchestrated bands of 1,300 neighbors, who picked up junk in Botetourt, Roanoke, Roanoke County, Salem and Vinton.
Dunlop, who came to Montgomery County with husband George and a little white poodle named Maggie, spent an hour or more pulling rusted metal drums and smelly debris from the impromptu dump.
"It's certainly not a legal place for dumping," she observed.
Asked how many of these neighborhood junk piles she's found, Dunlop thought a minute.
"It's hard for me to say, because I've only been in office 90 days," she said.
"But I suspect we're going to find more of these than we'd like."
The folks from Virginia Tech's Ecocycle sure found one last year.
"Last year, we found some dead cows," said Elliot Gibbs.
"It's pretty unsavory out here. I don't think we're going to be able to finish today. But this is part of life. People need to get rid of their trash. If they can't pay the fees, they get rid of it the most convenient way possible," he said.
Then he leaned over and helped a fellow worker excavate a TV from beneath a pile of leaves.
Mike Fallon, also with Ecocycle, recalled all the work his club did last year to clean up the illegal dump site at Seneca Hollow, which still is pristine after all these months. To halt erosion, Ecocycle wants to plant trees there soon.
"In some ways, it's environmental justice," he said. "Some people can't pay tipping fees."
He's happy to help. The day's coordinator, Dawn French, looked up at the hill and put it this way:
"At least we can clean this up."
As Dunlop paused, she noted the youth of the workers. The cleanup is a good lesson in stewardship, she said.
"This is obviously not good stewardship," she said, viewing heaps of white or rusted metal. "The kids can see the consequences. Other people have to go out and fix it."
Mid-morning, Dunlop left the hillside and took a drive around the county. She stopped at the Broomin' & Bloomin' volunteer picnic at Blacksburg Municipal Park, where a classroom and Virginia Tech dormitory recycling program, sponsored by five area businesses, also was launched.
In a brief speech before a hot dog-chomping crowd, Dunlop noted that "to have a healthy environment, we need a healthy economy."
The two, she urged, are mutually dependent.
Then she read a proclamation from Gov. George Allen, who has named April 16 to May 16 as Spring Renewal Time in Virginia:
"Sound progressive farming, fishing, timbering and business practices can provide needed economic growth while enhancing the resource base.
"Virginians are committed to the goal of leaving our commonwealth in better condition than they found it."
Hence, a sunny day to go out "Cleanin' & Greenin,' " or even "Broomin' & Bloomin'."
"The way it was raining last night, I thought it was going to be moppin' and soppin,' " Huppert said.
by CNB