photo by: Dawn Buehler / Friends of the Kaw

Friends of the Kaw’s trained volunteers pull tires out of the Kansas River between Eudora and De Soto in October. A Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks game warden helps ferry the tires away by boat.

Bill Hughes has his eyes on a hot tub.

The Valley Falls resident isn’t planning a bathroom remodel, though. He’s part of a volunteer group that helps clean up the Kansas River.

The hot tub is lodged in the river bottom and it’s too large to lug away. It pops into view during dry spells, when the water level drops.

Each time that happens, Hughes and other volunteers with Friends of the Kaw take another literal whack at removing it.

“Piece by piece,” he said. “Whatever you can get above the waterline.”

They grab a chainsaw and paddle kayaks about three-quarters of a mile downstream from Ogden. Then they lop the exposed parts of the tub into manageable chunks, stack them on the back of their kayaks and ferry them away.

When trying to clean up an entire river, patience is the name of the game. It’s paying off.

Since 2018, Friends of the Kaw volunteers have dug 30 tons of vehicle battery cases out of sandbars. They’ve heaved about 3,500 tires from the water, often enlisting help from city governments, state agencies and private companies that own boats, trucks and heavy equipment.

So dramatic is the progress that the group now wants to finish clearing all of the Kansas River’s decades-old trash sites by 2030 — a goal that would have felt unreachable in the past.

“Sandbars are a lot cleaner now,” Hughes said. “We can do this – if we can have enough volunteers and we can keep at it.”

Decades-old sites

Thousands of the battery cases have jutted out of sand south of Manhattan for 60 years, marring the world’s longest prairie-based river.

Friends of the Kaw’s trained volunteers, who are called river guides because they are experienced kayakers who also teach the public about paddling and river ecology, started removing the cases six years ago.

Even after removing 30 tons, they continue to pry out 2 to 6 tons of the cases each year.

This battery case graveyard is just one example of the sites slated to be finished by 2030 — places along the river where very specific kinds of garbage accumulated decades ago and lay untouched until recently.

“I’m not leaving those (sites) to my grandkids,” said Dawn Buehler, executive director of the 33-year-old nonprofit group. “I’m not leaving those to the next generation.”

The origin stories behind these garbage collections are often murky, but they don’t always involve illegal dumping. Some stem from practices that were once common but make little sense in hindsight.

Construction crews used to, for example, receive marching orders to simply dump old bridges into the water after tearing them down. And farmers used to tie tires to stream banks, hoping to hold onto precious soil during storms.

It turned out the tires didn’t help — and floods ripped them from their tethering. They washed downstream, often into large clusters of several hundred that Friends of the Kaw inspects by drone when planning how to tackle them.

Floodwaters may also explain the car and truck battery cases. The empty cases made of heavy rubber were left after batteries were removed for recycling. They came from Fort Riley and were stored close to the river.

Tackling garbage on such a large scale doesn’t just require persistence. It takes skill, cooperation and muscle.

“What we do is hard work,” Buehler said. “It is hard labor.”

Below the Bowersock Dam in Lawrence, dozens of people took advantage of low water levels in 2017 to remove the metal beams of an old bridge lodged in a sandbar island.

Utility company Evergy sent its Green Team to cut up the beams with hot saws. Friends of the Kaw then transported the pieces by boat from the sandbar to the banks, where more Evergy employees waited with a boom truck and skid steers to haul these up the banks and load them into trucks.

Friends of the Kaw found a giant, plastic septic tank on an island in the river and used a chainsaw to cut it into sections small enough for a game warden to transport to Manhattan by boat. Next, Riley County workers pitched in by hauling the pieces from the boat ramp to a landfill.

City and county governments often help on such projects, too. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks sends game wardens with airboats. Kansas Backcountry Hunters and Anglers adds a boat and some extra hands to the mix. And college groups, such as the Students for Environmental Action at Kansas State University, pitch in.

Eddies full of plastic

Sometimes people take large appliances and other items to the Kansas River and dump them illegally. Volunteers come across freshly dumped refrigerators and water heaters.

As frustrating as that is, the river guides have found that smaller trash has become the bigger problem.

Although people continue to toss litter from car windows, plastic often finds its way to the Kansas River in other ways. A gust of wind might knock over a row of recycling bins on a suburban street. Or an overflowing gas station trash can could shed a steady stream of candy wrappers.

In a typical year, Friends of the Kaw coordinates up to a dozen cleanups, from Junction City to Kansas City, Kansas. Participation is sometimes limited to experienced paddlers for safety reasons.

But many cleanups, like a September event at Kaw Point, are public occasions that draw hundreds of people to pick up litter on land along the river that would otherwise blow into the water on the next gusty day.

Even items discarded far from the banks of the Kansas River can gradually make their way there. Rains sweep them to the nearest stormwater drain, then into a creek or stream that leads to the river.

Downstream from each city, volunteers find telltale eddies filled with plastic.

Eddies are pockets of the river that swirl. Soda bottles, packaging, tennis balls and children’s toys accumulate in the circular movement. There they bob and float until the next storm flushes them further downstream.

Eventually, they flow to the Missouri River, down the Mississippi River and into the plastic-laden Gulf of Mexico.

Buehler grew up on a farm along the Kansas River. She holds the title of Kansas riverkeeper. Riverkeepers are public advocates who focus on specific watersheds.

The Kansas River supports threatened species, like the plains minnow. It is home to 27 pairs of nesting bald eagles. And in 2019, Friends of the Kaw confirmed the presence of river otters, a species that disappeared for decades from much of its range, including Kansas, because of hunting and other human activity.

The many people who put hands to work cleaning the Kansas River want to help such wildlife and protect the river that provides drinking water to more than 800,000 northeast Kansans.

They’re also motivated by their love of its scenery.

“I want to get to the point where you go down the Kansas River,” Buehler said, “and you appreciate this beautiful, braided sandbar prairie river — and don’t see all the trash.”

— Celia Llopis-Jepsen reports for Kansas News Service.