Dumped tires. A Fort Mill creek. Her third go at moving them, she’s asking for help.

It’s a tired creek. And Brittnay Brown is tired of seeing it that way.

Brown, director of Nation Ford Land Trust, is gearing up for her third go at emptying Sugar Creek of its tires.

“We removed 72 tires from one section of the creek,” she said of a Sept. 16 clean-up, when a handful of volunteers showed up to help. “That brings our total to 135 tires removed. There's still several hundred left.”

In the spring, Brown noticed a massive amount of tires in the creek near the Nation Ford Greenway, across from Nation Ford High School near the Regent Park area. About a dozen students joined her to start removing them in May. Brown still isn’t sure how all the tires got there.

She hasn’t noticed new ones since the spring and isn’t sure whether it’s the attention she’s trying to bring to the creek causing whoever had been dumping them to stop, or whether some other large tire dump could be coming.

“We believe the disposal point is one of the bridges to the north, close to the North Carolina border,” Brown said.

Even having hauled out tires just a few weeks prior, Brown is putting out a call for volunteers to help Oct. 14. While cleaning state waterways is still on the minds of many.

Brown is a site captain this year for a statewide Beach Sweep and River Sweep program. The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources sponsors it each year. Events run through September and October.

Last year, the official River Sweep included 27 inland sites in 19 counties. More than 1,000 volunteers collected more than 27,000 pounds of litter and debris, along almost 70 miles of rivers and lakes. Typical items like cans, bottles, takeout food containers and bait containers were collected. So were tires, a complete bed, shopping carts, a lawn mower, a bottle of vodka, a chicken sandwich, men’s formal suit, toilet and more.

There were 26 organizations providing volunteers, along with individuals pitching in to help.

“It’s been going on for 29 years now,” said Bill Marshall with SCDNR, who heads the inland clean-ups. “We really just promote it and the volunteers like Brittnay step up and do all the work. It's an impressive bunch of numbers when you look at all that’s accumulated over all these years.”

Those numbers don’t include Beach Sweep, which last year had almost 2,700 people collect more than 20,400 pounds of debris from 174 miles of shoreline.

Lake Wylie has its own Riversweep. That event covers two states and three counties surrounding the lake. Volunteers can work at one of more than a dozen sites Saturday morning. Riversweep events on Lake Wylie can draw 1,000 or more people.

Brown isn’t expecting nearly as many at her Oct. 14 event, but always could use a few more hands.

“The more volunteers we have at these clean-ups, the more we can get out at one time,” she said.

It likely will be spring before she tries to tackle the tire problem again.

“We have a long way to go, but this will be the last one this year,” Brown said.

Anyone can help. Children younger than 14 need to be accompanied by an adult. Brown encourages people to dress for getting wet.

“Whoever gets in the water needs to wear shoes that will protect their feet out there in the water,” Brown said.

The Sugar Creek event is a little different from others, including on Lake Wylie where marinas and boat access areas make up most of the collection sites. Marshall said there are wildlife and aesthetic impacts to keeping waters clean, as well as economic ones when those areas are populated by recreational boat and other traffic.

“The benefit to the state is it’s a focus on cleaning up our waterways,” he said. “It really is scratching the surface. It certainly cleans up the gateway.”

How the Sugar Creek clean-up, which isn’t on a high recreation use area, is similar is the tire collection can be an opportunity for civic groups and others to make a difference.

“It's volunteers cleaning up the places they care about,” Marshall said.

The Sugar Creek event runs 9 a.m. to noon. For more, visit the Nation Ford Land Trust page on Facebook.

This story was originally published October 4, 2017 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Dumped tires. A Fort Mill creek. Her third go at moving them, she’s asking for help.."