The water was a little murkier and chillier than in the Caribbean, and the underwater sights consisted of more empty beer bottles than exotic fish or coral reef.
But for the handful of scuba divers who joined a massive cleanup effort Sunday of the Busse Lake shoreline in the Ned Brown Preserve near Northwest Rolling Meadows, the plunge was worth it.
“In salt water, you do it for the visuals, the beauty of it,” said William Lauseng, 45, an electronics technician from Zion. “Here, there is almost no visibility, and all you find is garbage. But it’s for a good cause, and I’m doing what I like to do.”
The divers were among the 150 volunteers who pitched in Sunday morning during the first organized cleanup of any of the 40 lakes in the Cook County Forest Preserve District. Organizers estimated that volunteers had picked up at least 750 large bags of trash in three hours.
The event was so successful that officials plan to organize more volunteer cleanups at other forest preserve lakes.
Officials gave credit to Chuck Thompson, a retired banker from Mt. Prospect, for getting the ball rolling.
Two years ago, Thompson suggested an organized cleanup after becoming fed up with the amount of trash he saw as an angler at the lake over the past two decades. Thompson had already taken it upon himself to clean up a small portion of the shoreline on his own, but he could not cover the rest of 100,000 feet of shoreline that surrounds the 590-acre lake.
Nor can maintenance crews in the 3,700 Ned Brown Preserve clean it all up.
“We can only maintain so much,” said Joe Mollica, assistant director of special events for the forest preserve.
On Sunday morning, Thompson, serving as the volunteer coordinator, handed out 30-gallon garbage bags, “pick sticks” and rubber gloves to the volunteers.
And the volunteers quickly learned that the 2.5 million visitors who use the area each year leave behind all sorts of trash.
Empty beer and liquor bottles made up a good portion of what visitors had discarded. Other items found included a sleeping bag, a hockey puck and a hammer.
Then there were those items that the volunteers did not want to touch even with gloves and a stick: used diapers and bags of human waste.
“We’re appalled at what people have left behind,” said Julie Stark, 39, a dental hygienist from Schaumburg who brought her two sons to the cleanup. “It’s really sad.”
The three brought out six bags of garbage.
In the 52-degree water, the divers wore three layers of thermal protection and thick gloves for feeling around on the bottom.
The divers, part of the Northrop Grumman Corp. Scuba Diving Club, have gone diving for debris in other areas and have several more dives planned this year. Though they have not found any hidden treasures, they have come close.
Eric Pihl, 30, a security guard from Arlington Heights, found a credit card that a Japanese tourist had dropped in Burnham Park Harbor in Lake Michigan. He sent it back–to the tourist’s surprise.
“You never know what you’ll come up with,” Pihl said.
