PRIDE has made a big difference in its 25 years of service

Some people might be surprised to find out that when I first started as a professional journalist nearly 29 years ago, environmental concerns were a big deal here in southeastern Kentucky although not in the way many people might be concerned about the environment today.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

Illegal dumps were a major problem in Whitley County with some having a price tag in excess of $250,000 to clean-up.

I remember then Judge-Executive Leroy Gilbert getting a company to donate the use of the largest excavator that I think I had ever seen with this giant scoop on it that reached over a cliff along the side of KY92E to scoop up trash, old couches, tires and so forth that had been dumped there over decades.

The excavator worked to fill three or maybe even four dump trucks that then rushed to the landfill to dump their loads and returned for more trash. This process went on for at least two days.

The illegal dumps were a product of their times. Many people in rural areas didn’t have garbage service. If you had an old couch or old mattress, many times there was no good way to get rid of it. People carried it back into the woods, or threw it over a bank.

It was the socially acceptable way of getting rid of such items at one point, as there were few good alternatives.

Another major environmental concern nearly 30 years ago were straight pipes.

For you city folks unfamiliar with a straight pipe is, back in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, many folks didn’t have any kind of septic service or septic tanks back up many of the creeks and hollers of southeastern Kentucky. Sewer service as such was only something that the city people had, if they were lucky.

The straight pipes as the name implies ran sewage from a home down to the nearest creek where it emptied out into the water.

Disgusting? Yeah.

When you only had a handful of homes up the holler though, this wasn’t such a big deal. This changed as rural areas became more densely populated.

In 1997, a bipartisan effort created the Personal Responsibility in a Desirable Environment (PRIDE) program, which deserves much of the credit for helping end the practice of straight pipes and illegal dumping.

U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers (KY-5) and the late James Bickford, who was the Kentucky Secretary for Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, created PRIDE. Its mission is to contribute to the economic and cultural growth of southern and eastern Kentucky by improving water quality, cleaning up solid waste problems and advancing environmental education, in order to improve living conditions for its residents while enhancing the potential for tourism industry growth in the region.

PRIDE created school clubs to educate students about the problems associated with littering. Each spring schools and some businesses took part in day-long trash pick-ups along with many other members of the community.

PRIDE helped secure funding to clean-up some of the bigger illegal dumps.

It helped secure funding to help people get septic tanks or get hooked up to sewer service.

It’s a great example of a program started by a couple of politicians that has made a lasting impact in its 42-county service area, and Rogers and Bickford deserve many thanks for creating it.

Since PRIDE was created, 445,827 people have volunteers with PRIDE picking up more than 985,128 bags of trash and 972,103 old tires.

April is PRIDE Spring Clean-up Month and, you can do your part to help clean-up our environment.