On the day of the big clean-up, a large-scale underwater clean-up was carried out in Jelgava. About twenty divers brought out hundreds of kilograms of garbage from the Driksa river, many of which have been lying at the bottom for almost half a century. During the past holidays, 1,149 objects were cleaned in the Great Cleanup in Latvia, of which 35 cleaning places were applied for in Jelgava.
Jelgava divers have looked into the bottom of the Driksa river before, but they could not complain about the lack of finds, so they decided to organize a wider cleaning of the river on the day of the Great Cleanup. “Driksa river because there is a large movement of people here. You want it not only to look clean, but also to be clean. In the summer, they travel here with catamarans and boats, swim, so it’s safe. You want to know that it is clean here,” says Shota Plijevs, the organizer of the diver cleanup.
This time around twenty divers from both Riga and Pieriga came to help. Each has its own equipment, but the problem is common to all. Visibility under water is only a few centimeters.
Pliev: “Nature surprised us. Especially before, which was snow and rain. The current is as it is when the ice goes, one might say, and the visibility is probably zero.”
There is no shortage of finds either. The riverbed holds a decades-old cultural layer, which is brought to the shore little by little. “They don’t see what’s lying there, so they highlight what they found: trees, boards, car tires. There is a lot of garbage here. I think that you can clean here many times, there will always be garbage,” says diving instructor Aleksej Kravchuk.
Soon, a unique exposition is formed on the riverbank, where you can find bicycle frames, baby carriages, tires from different eras, metal boxes in which milk bottles were once placed, a garbage container from around the same time, as well as a popular children’s toy produced in Latvia many decades ago. “That’s who we are as people. One fertilizes, the other cleans. It makes sense that if we don’t clean, we will grow into dung. In this way, we also show the youth. I am sure that those who participated here today will never throw anything,” says Arnis Garjānis, a member of the cleanup.
The underwater scavengers were also helped by young people who picked up various garbage along the river’s shoreline, as well as dragged objects that were properly buried in the sand into the field with the help of hooks. Together, the rescuers managed to pull out about seven cubic meters of garbage from the river. The organizers of the clearing say that the cleaning of Driksa will definitely be continued.
