The Connecticut River watershed encompasses 11,000 square miles in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The river itself empties into the Long Island Sound after flowing 410 miles from the Quebec-New Hampshire border, making it the longest river in New England.
Its reach is one of the reasons why more than 2,000 volunteers in four states turn out every year during the annual Source to Sea Cleanup to pull trash from the river and its tributaries. This year’s cleanup will be held on Friday and Saturday.
Some 2,000-2,500 volunteers turn out every year, said Angela Mrozinski, outreach and events director for the Connecticut River Conservancy, which hosts the event. They tend to break into 100-150 groups.
“In New Hampshire and Vermont it’s a very long stretch of river,” she said. And while the river “does tend to stay a little cleaner up there,” Mrozinski said, that doesn’t mean that the work is any less important.
Roy Schiff, a water resource scientist at Milone and MacBroom in Waterbury, Vt., has been participating in the Source to Sea effort for five years and leads a volunteer group in Hanover.
“We’ve been working with the town and Dartmouth College with projects on Girl Brook,” he said. Girl Brook flows through Pine Park and the Hanover Country Club. “We like to give back to the communities that we work in.”
The engineering and environmental science firm has its headquarters in Cheshire, Conn., and an office in Springfield, Mass., among other locations. “We’re kind of in the whole basin,” he said.
Schiff said his group typically covers 3 to 4 miles and picks up about the same amount of trash every year.
“I think a lot of it is urban runoff,” he said.
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