Teens provide help clean up Rahway River branch in Woodbridge

Grass, reeds, mud, birds and tadpoles is what you should find along the Rahway River.

But a group of 106 township high school students, Boy Scouts and local officials also spotted — and removed — plenty of other additions to the ecosystem: An old couch bed, lawn mowers, eight bicycles, several TV sets, a dozen tires and even an entire car frame with a gas tank, a partial engine and a license plate.

About 1.5 tons of trash were cleared from a half-mile stretch of the South Branch of the Rahway River near Cooper Field in Iselin on Monday morning in the township's 2nd annual River Clean-Up Project.

The effort was sponsored by the township Community Advisory Panel, or CAP, which is made up of residents, officials and representatives from Woodbridge-based petro-chemical companies.

Members of the environmental clubs at the township's three high schools did most of the manual labor, group vice chairman Frank Sutphen said.

Sutphen, a Port Reading resident who's retired from the township police department, said the clean-up project was re-launched last year because it had been "20 years since there had been any organized clean-up of any stream in Woodbridge."

Last year the group removed 1,915 pounds of garbage from the Woodbridge River in Port Reading, he said.

This year's weirdest find, the car frame, was checked out by the police department, which did not believe it was stolen and suspected that it had been resting there for seven years after it had been stripped for parts, Sutphen said.

The group's corporate members — Hess, Colonial Pipeline, PSE&G, Hatco, PQ Corporation, Motiva, Cytec Industries and Akzo Nobel — paid for township garbage trucks to pick up the trash and for bags, rakes, shovels and lunch.

Fourth Ward Councilman James Major said the township will only remove items from the river or its banks when the items are largely visible or potentially dangerous, such as drum barrel.

He said Monday's good work will be "contagious" when friends, relatives and people reading the newspaper see what the teenagers accomplished.

"It's very unlikely you'll see one of these kids littering," he said. "We want people to take pride in their township and to be willing to go the extra mile. And, if that's as small as not throwing out a McDonald's wrapper, . . . we gained something."

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