Once a year, the Geeste is cleared of coarse garbage:
Since the Clean City Control Center was founded in Bremerhaven, a team from bremenports' diving department has regularly set out to clean up the river of carelessly discarded garbage. This year, five colleagues have once again been on the job: With a 6x4 meter pontoon in tow, they then set off along the river in a wade - and this time they once again made plenty of “loot”.
“This is the third year in a row that bremenports employees have been deployed there, and each time the pontoon is fully loaded at the end of the operation,” reports Christian von Deetzen from the flood protection department. It is particularly noticeable that large objects are repeatedly recovered from the water: “It's mainly shopping carts that end up in the river for unknown reasons. But old bicycles, barbecues, e-scooters, pots or large plastic parts such as building site barriers are also almost always included. Once we even had a safe - but unfortunately without any contents,” reports von Deetzen with a grin.
Not only is the bremenports team contributing to a cleaner Geeste, as fortunately, there are not only dubious individuals who inexplicably throw things into the river, but also many people who help with the cleanup. For example, water sports enthusiasts support the initiative. "The canoeists and other water sports enthusiasts always collect floating trash when they pass by during their activities. We can only thank them for this effort – as we couldn’t get out on the Geeste often enough ourselves," emphasizes von Deetzen, and adds: "We take care of the larger waste during our annual cleanup tour."
At the same time, the bremenports colleagues used this year's "spring cleaning" for further work: For example, the pegellates, over which the tide flushes day after day, were cleaned, so that the water level can now be read again. In addition, on behalf of the magistrate, 20 new Priggen were set to mark the fairway for the water sports enthusiasts. "This was also a bit of new territory for us, because we switched our system from wood priggen to steel priggen. We hope that the steel primers, which are about 14m long and are flushed into the ground, will have a significantly longer shelf life, "concludes Christian von Deetzen.
