By Dan Klepal
and Reid Forgrave
The Cincinnati Enquirer

More than 5,600 people helped collect 351,900 pounds of trash in just a few hours Saturday as the Great American Cleanup visited 88 locations across Greater Cincinnati.

In addition to trash, the cleanups netted 5,615 old tires discarded on streets and vacant lots. The volunteers also planted 250 bushes, shrubs and trees across the region.

Cincinnati City Councilman Chris Smitherman joined a group in Avondale that rappelled down the hillside off Burton Avenue to pull out bikes, furniture and floor tiles from an illegal dump.

"The cleanup was a great success," said Kerry Crossen, event program manager for Keep Cincinnati Beautiful. "The Great American Cleanup isn't so much a cleanup anymore as it is a community event. We get neighbors out picking up trash side by side, then they go celebrate together."

The number of volunteers at this year's event exceeded last year by nearly 700. "This year's volunteers were amazing," added Linda Holterhoff, executive director of Keep Cincinnati Beautiful.

A separate cleanup focused on Mill Creek, one of the most polluted waterways in the nation because of raw sewage discharges into the stream during heavy rain. A group of 16 volunteers canoed through the neighborhoods of Reading, Lockland and Arlington Heights, collecting enough trash to fill a dump truck.

Bruce Koehler, who organized the 10th annual event, said the biggest trophy collected this year was a car hood.

"It looked like it came from a full-sized American model," Koehler said. "It's really kind of hard to carry that in a canoe. I think they (the volunteers) sat on it."

The group also pulled out a water heater and two air-conditioning motors. Then they celebrated at a Reading bar.

"The best-tasting beer in the world is any brand after cleaning up the Mill Creek," Koehler said.

Across the river in Fort Mitchell, Saturday morning's trash cleanup focused on Doe Run Lake, where Jennifer Minnick found the strangest object of the day - a rusty metal bedpan jutting up from a walking trail.

"If there's metal in the ground, I'd rather pick it up than let my dogs' feet get cut on it," said Minnick as her fiance, Blaine Edmonds, tried to calm the Erlanger couple's two chocolate Labrador Retrievers, Moose and Rocky. "We come out here all the time to take the dogs on the trails and let them swim in the lake. We're just trying to make this a cleaner, safer place for everybody."

Minnick was one of 100 mud-encrusted Kentuckians who walked the Doe Run Lake's perimeter Saturday morning picking up litter that's accumulated since the cleanup effort last year. She wasn't the only person with odd finds: There was a horseshoe, a flyswatter, pepper spray, a one-gallon jug of used motor oil, a toothbrush, a dirty woven rug and a propane tank. (Several years back, someone found a bowling ball.)

"I hate to see a beautiful place like this with bottles and cans and litter all over the place," said Steve Povkov of Erlanger, who came with his 12-year-old son, Ryan, finder of the propane tank and a turtle shell.

Ryan was covered in mud from his tennis shoes to his knees after a spill into the lake.

"He fell in and kept sinking, and he hollered 'Help!' " his father said with a laugh.

The cleanup crew also included a dozen students from Simon Kenton High School in Independence, including the mud-drenched "Garbage Terminator," Chelsey Johnson, 17.

With a half-dozen friends, Johnson hauled a seven-foot long wooden plank from the lake's edge several hundred feet up a muddy hill. The group was still going strong even as the cleanup petered out around noon.

"I guess people at picnics just don't know where all their stuff ends up," said Laura Lawless, 18.

E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com or rforgrave@enquirer.com