SVSU Students Clean Saginaw Bay Beach

September 16, 2012
By: O. J. Cunningham

Some 24 Saginaw Valley State University student volunteers headed out to clean the Bay City State Recreation Area Saturday, Sept. 15, taking part in a national effort to monitor and maintain Great Lakes beaches.

For SVSU students, the work will involve more than just collecting litter. Student volunteers - many taking geography courses - will investigate the beach's health, identifying possible pollution sources, checking bacteria levels and reporting the data they collect to an online database.



The event is part of the annual fall clean-up planned by the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that organizes some 10,000 volunteers a year all around the Great Lakes. Saturday's clean-up also happens to coincide with the Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup Day.

The visit is one of several SVSU has committed to at the Bay City State Recreation area. SVSU recently stepped up within the Alliance for the Great Lakes to receive more training and become one of its Tier 2 beach adopters. In the new role, the student group monitors the beach regularly, and the data they collect is considered more reliable by beach health agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In August, a team of SVSU mechanical engineering students tested a device they built to remove muck from the Saginaw Bay shoreline.

Previously, the Saginaw Bay had been named one of three areas of particular interest for the Alliance's Tier 2 monitoring. The project is part of the organization's work under the federal Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a project undertaken by 11 federal agencies to reduce waterway problems such as toxins and invasive species.

Saturday's clean-up started at 9 a.m. and concluded by noon. For more information, please contact Marty Arford, associate professor of geography, at (989) 964-2074 or mrarford@svsu.edu.