Tires, tires everywhere for volunteers cleaning Blue River

Plunging her boots into wet muck, Stephanie Fama bent down Saturday morning and, with some might, yanked a car’s black rubber tire from beneath the water in Swope Park that leads to the Blue River.

After that, she found yet another. That made two of the mountain of 1,200 automobile and truck tires that volunteers on Saturday expected to pluck from the land and waters along the Blue, which cuts diagonally up through Kansas City.

“You know what’s weird?” Fama said, upset at the sheer volume. “They do this every year.”

By “this,” Fama meant the annual Project Blue River Rescue, now in its 26th year.

From about 9 a.m. to noon, 750 or so volunteers spread out at 32 work sites along the Blue and its feeder streams to pick up and pry away mountains of trash that had collected there over just the last 12 months.

“You name it,” said project section leader Stuart Caswell, “we’ve found it.”

Toxic and leaking car batteries, and car parts. Paper, plastic, glass debris of all sorts. And tires, tires and more tires.

Last year, the volunteers got 800. This year, an earlier cleanup scouting survey already warned them there would be more.

The culprit? Regular people, yes, tossing their tires in the woods and water. But more likely, Caswell said, is that the tires come from unscrupulous independent tire dealers who claim, for a small fee, that they’ll take a customer’s used tires and recycle.

“Instead,” Caswell said, “they pocket the money and dump the tires. They show up in darkness, dump 50 tires and take off.”

This year’s Blue River Rescue cleanup comes at a significant time. KC Water, formerly called Kansas City Water Services, is using April to celebrate the completion of the Blue River Channel Project, a $300 million flood control project whose planning began 46 years ago with the signing of the federal 1970 Flood Control Act.

Heavy construction to deepen and widen 12 miles of the Blue River by about 6 to 8 feet — thus protecting homes, business and property — began in earnest in 1983. Major construction ended in September.

“So,” said Lynda Hoffman, KC Water’s waterways division manager. “if you used to get flooded at 6 feet, you’re not getting flooded at all.”

Federal money paid for about 80 percent of the project. Twenty percent was paid for using revenue from Kansas City’s half-cent sales tax. Beyond improving the river channel, the channel project removed some 200 structures and 8 miles of roadway from the floodplain. It made improvements to 21 bridges.

It also removed about 10,000 tires.

To celebrate the project, KC Water Services and allied organizations have scheduled events for every Friday and Saturday in April that the public is encouraged to attend. They include talks, nature walks, educational tours and other outings that can be found at kcwaterservices.org.

“We’re calling it our celebration month,” Hoffman said. “It took long enough. We didn’t want to have just one celebration. We deserved a month.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 4:11 PM.