NORTH DAKOTA, Grand Forks County SCD – Mats of cattails and green duckweed. Plastic bottles. Large pieces of foam sheeting. Cans. Blocks of wood. Balls of all shapes and sizes, including a basketball and volleyball.
Cleaning up the mess would be a big job, but that was the task facing Justin Parks, watershed coordinator for the Grand Forks County Soil Conservation District, and his co-workers, Jill Kvasager, Joshua Moe and Ryan Thorson.
While Kvasager and Thorson tackled the job from shore, Parks and Moe gathered debris from a canoe with garden rakes and a landing net. By the time they wrapped up the job, they had collected some 200 pounds of trash. The work wouldn’t have been out of place in an episode of “Dirty Jobs,” the reality TV show that ran from November 2003 to September 2012.
