Keeping our river clear sometimes means cleaning up after others and Red River Revival is making it happen
The Red River has made it possible for people from our region to have water, food, and so much more for generations. Unfortunately, its importance is not always respected, and sometimes cleaning needs to take place to maintain the river for future generations. Red River Revival, with some help from Submerged Underwater Services Inc., did just that as they recently pulled a stolen car from the river, removing a source of many different pollutants.
Red River Revival removed a stolen vehicle from the Red River earlier this month
“Red River Revival is a Métis-led environmental cleanup project. We’re a not-for-profit organization focused on cleaning the Red River, the Assiniboine, and the tributaries industrially. We are not looking at this as a grassroots movement. We are looking at this as an industrial cleanup of the Red and the Assiniboine,” said R.J. Kusmack, Executive Director of Red River Revival.
The vehicle was retrieved from the area where Netley Creek meets the Red River. It was a 2022 Chevy Malibu, and information from the retrieved license plate indicated that it was stolen in 2024.
The group knew where to look for the vehicle because a scan of the Red River last year indicated an anomaly in the area.
“This winter we went out and cut a hole in the ice, sent a diver down and pulled the license plate off, then reported it to the RCMP and MPI,” said Kusmack.
From there, the plan to retrieve the vehicle was underway, though the breaking up of the ice and spring weather did delay its retrieval by a few weeks.
The process of extracting a car from the river is really quite involved, but the professionals who brought this car up made it look easy.
“We launched a large boat, sent a dive team down, attached big airbags that float the vehicle to the surface. Then we dragged the boat along the surface of the water to the boat launch, and we had a local tow truck company, Terry’s Towing, pull the vehicle out of the water and onto a flat deck trailer, which, it went at that point, to an MPI compound for further investigation,” explained Kusmack.
The vehicle was very heavy, not just because it was waterlogged, but because over the two years or so it had been in the water, the vehicle had accumulated a great deal of silt as well as an unfortunate number of zebra muscles.
“One thing that I found surprising, because the vehicle was in such shallow water, boats were passing over top of it, and propellers were actually hitting the roof of the car. There were actually slash marks on the roof from boat propellers, so not only did we pull the vehicle out of the environment, helping our waterways, but we also made the waterways safer by not having a big chunk of metal for our props to be hitting,” said Kusmack.
Red River Revival isn’t just in the business of removing cars from our waterways. They understand the importance of retrieving all types of items from the river. In fact, last fall, they removed $57,000 worth of shopping carts from one city park in Winnipeg. Out of the 127 shopping carts that they removed, 96 went back to their rightful retailers, saving Manitoba businesses money as well.
There are a lot of reasons that cleaning up the Red benefits residents.
“It’s important to keep our waterways clear for our future generations, for our children. We only get the opportunity to experience one Mother Nature. We will never get another one,” said Kusmack.
With this vehicle removal, Red River Revival is doing what they can for the river, and they aren’t planning to stop. Kusmack explained that they have more removals of items from the river ahead and that by the end of the summer, they would love to completely map the floor of the Red River and use that information to start building a game plan for future priorities.
Kusmack hopes to encourage everyone to do their part to keep the river clear.
“It’s something that we do every weekend when we go ice fishing. We always go ice fishing, but we make sure to actually pick up a full garbage bag before we leave our environment. It’s our goal to educate the future generations to leave this planet better than how we found it,” he said.
If Red River Revival is something you’d like to keep up or support, there are a few ways that you can follow their progress. They are on Instagram at www.instagram.com/redriverrevivalproject and on the web at www.redriverrevival.ca, though they are still perfecting their website.
“You can also touch base with your counsellors, your MLAs, any politician that’s willing to listen, because as of right now, finding funding for river cleanups has seemed to be an uphill battle. And, with more people pounding the drums, saying that we need this type of environmental stewardship, I think that our politicians might just come around and start supporting great concepts like ours,” said Kusmack.
