Lake Erie starts here...with a little help from the neighborhood

Visit Grant Deming's Forest Hill Historic District to view our storm drain stenciling project, part of a neighborhood cleanup Trash Mob Day on Earth Day in 2012 and 2013.

Project partners Dennis Zentarski, City of Cleveland Heights Commissioner of Utilities (whose office supplied the paint, a couple of service department employees and paid for the stencil), volunteer graphic designer/resident Laurie Garrett, and Grant Deming Forest HIll residents Susan Miller, Carla Rautenberg, Ashley Sparks, and Sarah Dick created the storm drain stencil project to remind people what's at stake when trash and toxins are thrown down the street drains. 

Neighbors, including property owner Mot Kovach, and the Heights High Project Build community service team, worked on completing the stenciling. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District supplied Pick Up Your Poop signs.

From organizer Susan Miller:

Yesterday and today nature is showing us how she does her spring cleaning. High winds have brought down more branches and of course, the flowers and seeds that are part of her cycle of life. This organic material blowing around often makes it into the stream via the storm drains - the very ones we stenciled on Sunday. It isn't necessarily bad if leaves, flowers or twigs enter the drains, but the oil and roadway pollutants they absorb while resting on the street go right down with them. 

For those of you who joined in the Trash Mob and those who were unable to join us, here are a couple links to help us all understand our watershed a bit better. Our neighborhood has a brook flowing under around and through it - Dugway Brook. 
http://www.gcbl.org/water/rivers/dugway-brook
http://youtu.be/vWzQVB8k9Bg
Please be mindful of the brook. Pick up trash that can clog the storm drains. Please fish out organic materials that accumulate when water rushes down the curbs. Please pick up after your pet, wash cars at car washes or on the grass so that the pollutants from your cars don't go in the brook. (Yes, that storm drain in your back driveway goes to the brook as well.) 

Original design by GDFH resident Laurie Garrett

Susan Miller and Glen Paul Amick

Project Build volunteers

If you haven't visited the Brook, you can see it and smell it (and the runoff from our neighborhood) in the stretch of open stream that runs between Berkshire and East Overlook near Coventry, in the open portion that runs along Euclid Heights Boulevard just east of Coventry School and in another section on the west side of Cumberland Park and Forest Hill Park. If you've heard the rush of water while standing at the intersection of Euclid Heights and Coventry while waiting to cross, that's Dugway. If you've wondered "What's that funky smell?" That's Dugway, polluted with our activities. 

So this is just an informational post in case you don't know about our watershed. Keepin' it clean is more than just make-up, dress-up, look good. It's also about our drinking water - water that will come at an increasingly high price.