A soccer ball sits among other trash along Chattanooga Creek Wednesday, August 8, 2018 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The creek was nearly impassible at a few spots where trash and debris had created a dam of sorts.Plastic grocery bags line miles of Chattanooga Creek, caught high in trees like vines clinging to the limbs along the creekside. The bags are what’s left of floating waste caught on branches before the creek subsided. Past the pipelines, the overwhelming smell of human waste and piles of trash, where the water opens to a cleaner space, the bags remain – a constant reminder of the negative impact people are having on local waterways.
“Unnatural art,” joked paddler Randy Whorton.
Through the creek in the heart of Chattanooga, downed trees act like dams in several areas, trapping single-use plastic, pollution and waste. Thousands of plastic bottles fill the creek alongside a menagerie of waste: a 55-gallon drum that once held automatic transmission fluid, shoes, basketballs, tires, Styrofoam, a shopping cart.
There isn’t a single source for the pollution: a person tossing a bottle from a passing car, remnants from several nearby homeless camps, trash collected in the city’s stormwater system and dumped into the creek, and the litter blown and washed into the creek during storms.
“This is the biggest problem in Chattanooga, as far as creeks are concerned, by far, in my opinion,” Whorton said. “I paddle them all. I’ve never seen anything get this bad.”