With teamwork, grit and a reciprocating saw, a group of volunteers in Alexandria successfully removed a piece of debris from the Mount Vernon Trail that they estimate weighed at least 500 pounds.
The Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail discovered the debris, a large sling fender, sitting in the Potomac River’s low tide line near the Marina Towers building at 501 Slaters Lane during the Nov. 15 Mega Trash Bash cleanup.
Videos posted by the group show volunteers pushing and pulling the hefty fender up a hill toward the nearby road. The discarded fender had cracked, and its foamy layers were filled with water.
“They had a good time helping pull it out, and then we got it on the ground, and I was like, ‘oh, we’ll just roll it to, you know, the highway,'” Cameron Taylor, a volunteer coordinator, told ALXnow. “And even that, I was like, ‘holy cow, this thing is so heavy.'”
Unable to move it any further, the team returned a week later with a Sawzall to cut the fender into smaller pieces before loading it on their cargo bikes for removal.
If the volunteers hadn’t noticed the fender and taken action, Taylor said, it would’ve risked sinking into the Potomac.
“We thought it was important to tell the story of this one piece of trash, right?” Taylor said. “I think people just, they see it magically disappear, and they’re like, ‘Okay, like, it’s gone,’ but it’s like, no, that was a lot of volunteers that got this out and prevented it from remaining in the river forever.”
The Mega Trash Bash pulled together 283 total volunteers from the Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail, Potomac Conservancy, Four Mile Run Conservatory and NOVA Cleanups. They removed a total of 4,219 pounds of litter — not including the fender — across the Mount Vernon Trail, Daingerfield Island, Four Mile Run, Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and nearby streams.
Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail contributed some 128 volunteers who collected 2,456 pounds of trash.
Looking ahead, the organization will continue to host weekly cleanups and invasive plant removal events. The group is also planning a New Year’s Day trash cleanup at Belle Haven Park.
“People have their resolutions of, like, ‘I want to give back,'” Taylor said. “Here’s an event —come.”
