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 laid untouched until recently.
