The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

Local News

April 19, 2010

River cleanup crew gets leg up on job — an artificial one

By Matt Snyder Herald Staff Writer

SHARON, JAMESTOWN —

There’s a mystery afoot in Sharon — under what circumstances do you throw out a prosthetic leg?

In the course of picking up 21 tons of trash on the riverbanks of the Shenango in Jamestown and Sharon on Saturday, the River Watchers came across one of those rare gems of trash that there is probably a story behind: a prosthetic leg, complete with shoe.

Finding unusual things during cleanup is not at all unusual, said Shenango River Watchers cofounder Rick Barborak, who said a few notable items sometimes make it to their annual banquets.

“You name it, we pretty much found it. Some things, you don’t want to know. We found inflatable dolls,” Barborak said.

The prosthetic leg will probably fall into their category of “keepers,” Barborak said. That also includes the River Watchers’ mascot, “Scrappy the Duck,” who is an immense duck-shaped concrete lawn ornament.

Finding stoves, water heaters, refrigerators, or even entire mashed up cars in the rivers or at their banks isn’t uncommon, Barborak said, and they’ve collected about 800,000 pounds of trash since their inception 9 years ago.

He said they hope to get to a million pounds of rubbish by their 10th-year anniversary this January. On Saturday, there were about 65 people participating between the two locations, and they got about 21 tons of trash. Much of that was scrap steel from the Jamestown location, which Barborak said had become a “literal” dump.

The leg was found in Sharon, he said.

Shenango River Watchers holds a number of cleanup events every year. Their next event will be a tire recycling day set for May 22, Barborak said.

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