WAILUA — Some 50 volunteers spent a couple of hours Saturday clearing vegetative debris that accumulated at the waterline of the popular Morgan’s Ponds swimming area at Lydgate Park. Organized by the Friends of Kamalani and Lydgate, the Kapa‘a High
WAILUA — Some 50 volunteers spent a couple of hours Saturday clearing vegetative debris that accumulated at the waterline of the popular Morgan’s Ponds swimming area at Lydgate Park.
Organized by the Friends of Kamalani and Lydgate, the Kapa‘a High School boys soccer team lent their brawn to the task. Tarps and pickups replaced wheelbarrows in the clean-up effort.
“This is part of giving back to the community which supports them,” said Kevin Cram, coach of the Warrior men’s soccer team. “We started at 8 a.m. and we’ll leave at 10 a.m. so we can watch the Kapa‘a girls play Hilo at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Sports Park.”
Thomas Noyes, coordinating the effort, said the County of Kaua‘i provided a trash container for the debris.
“We weren’t sure if the container was going to arrive on time, but the clean-up was going on irregardless,” Noyes said. “If the container did not arrive, we were going to pile the debris away from the waterline so the swimmers could access the swimming area.”
John Lydgate, the park being named for his grandfather, was busy helping spruce up the keiki swimming area. He noted that despite the renovation work where the seawall was built up higher and reinforced, the debris caused by runoff in the Wailua River from last week’s storm continues to plague the volunteers who join the county’s Parks crew in keeping the area clean.
“We need a piece of equipment to be stationed here so whenever a storm comes, we can clean up faster,” Lydgate said, noting that a Bobcat equipped with a claw similar to those used for sugarcane harvesting would handle the task.
“I guess we can’t win with Mother Nature,” Lydgate said, lugging two full buckets of debris to the waiting container.
