Volunteers work to clean up Kentucky River

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – For close to thirty years, people have been coming together at the very bottom of Fayette County to clean up the Kentucky River.

“We have volunteers who have been coming for 10 or more years. They bring their boats, kayaks, and canoes. They bring all sorts of boats,” said Environmental Initiative Specialist for the City of Lexington, Jennifer Myatt.

The city also provides boats, including some from the Lexington Fire Department.

“We send people out in boats with litter-pickers, trash bags, and gloves. They basically just pull trash out of the river,” said Myat.

Myatt says the city hosts the Kentucky River Clean Sweep every June as a way to start the summer off with a clean river.

“What’s kind of cool is sometimes people come back and they’ve seen the river and it’s neat but they’re like, ‘I couldn’t find any trash.’ That’s good! Every year we do it, we have less and less trash that we find,” said Myatt.

Myatt says this means people are littering less and getting better about cleaning up trash, which is important.

“We want to keep our environment healthy. We want to keep our water clean so it’s important to bring people out and let them see firsthand that we do have a river and it is important to clean up trash and keep things clean,” said Myatt.

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