With 15 volunteers, five canoes and a boat, the Austin Rotaract club set out last Saturday morning, June 4, to clean more than two miles of the Cedar River in Austin. Five hundred pounds of trash later, they finished.

It was the first organized cleanup of the Cedar River in many years under the state’s Adopt-A-River program, which is being used as part of an initiative started last fall by the Cedar River Watershed District. Using the program, CRWD created cleanup routes along the Cedar River throughout the county. Rotaract members started at 9 a.m., with volunteers setting out to clean a stretch of the river from the Ramsey Dam on Austin’s northern edge to Mill Pond downtown. Some members walked up river on both banks from Mill Pond while others started paddling down river from the Ramsey Dam, said Alex Kasak, a Rotaract member who led the group’s cleanup.

“We spent nearly seven hours on the Cedar River and collected around 500 pounds of trash and debris,” Kasak said.

Kasak also plans to present the groups results at CRWD’s monthly board meeting, Wednesday at 7 p.m.

Members of Rotaract planned multiple cleanups of the route on its two-year commitment with the Adopt-A-River program, too. Rotaract is just one of nine groups that have signed up for the cleanup program.

“There is much more work to be done,” Kasak added. “And the group is looking forward to bettering the Cedar River one step at a time.”