The Upper Tallapoosa Watershed Group celebrates its 10th annual river clean-up of the Little Tallapoosa today.

Between 50-100 people will meet at 9 a.m. at the band parking lot on the University of West Georgia campus and divide into groups to remove trash from the river. One group will collect trash in Haralson County off Liner Road, another will pick up lead tire weights in the parking lots around campus, and the third group will clean the river and its flood plain behind campus.

Curtis Hollabaugh, president and founder of the Upper Tallapoosa Watershed Group and chairman of UWG’s Geosciences Department, expects the event to be a success.

“Anything that’s in the river that man put in there needs to come out,” Hollabaugh said. His group plans to take a look at the consequences of building parking lots in close proximity to the river, and will analyze what types of waste reach the river.

“We’re looking in particular for lead this time, lead weights fall off the wheels of cars and get washed into our systems.” said Hollabaugh.

After 10 years of cleaning the river, Hollabaugh sees definite improvement in its ecological condition.

“I think we’ve made great progress in getting a lot of material out of the river,” he said, but added, “Unfortunately, a lot of people still dump things in there.”

Dumpers frequently discard tires, beer cans and other waste into the river. Although the group removes the trash during annual river clean-ups, keeping the garbage at bay is a never-ending battle. Last year, UWG volunteers cleaned up 86 bags of trash, 26 tires, a pool table, parts of a VCR and a microwave, and a train wheel.

The Upper Tallapoosa Watershed Group was originally organized 10 years ago at the dawn of the so-called “water wars” with Alabama, when a plan was floated to put a 2,300-acre lake on the Little Tallapoosa in Haralson County. Ellie Busse, a volunteer with the UTWG and lab technician for UWG, helped found the group in 1999.

“We started [the group] because the Little Tallapoosa was not meeting its designated uses, and [was] placed on the impaired list of rivers in Georgia,” said Busse.

Plans to expand the drinking water supply, however, were foiled when the state of Alabama sued the Army Corps of Engineers, putting Georgia’s lake expansion plans on hold indefinitely. By continuing to work with Rivers Alive, part of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, the group has continued its mission to keep the Little Tallapoosa as free as possible of garbage.

“It is amazing how much trash we collect each year,” said Busse.

But there is more to protecting the watershed than just picking up trash, according to Hollabaugh.

“I think there are a lot of things we can do, like better conservation, and better searching for productive groundwater,” said Hollabaugh. “Some people are recycling sewage through wetlands, and there is a long list of possibilities that we can improve on, like rainwater harvesting and leak detection.”

Hollabaugh ranks the Little Tallapoosa in the middle of the pack when compared to other watersheds in Georgia.

“We’re a lot better off than the Chattahoochee River itself, we don’t have any fishing bans or things like that,” said Hollabaugh.

“It’s much cleaner than many of the steams in Atlanta, but we’re not as clean as some of the streams you get in the North Georgia mountains, so we’re kind of in the middle.”

The event is sponsored by the UWG Department of Geosciences, the Upper Tallapoosa Watershed Group and Rivers Alive, which is part of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.