Record Staff
On Saturday, Conservation Lac Brome (CLB), in collaboration with the Brome Lake Boating Club and divers from Faisons Notre Part, came together to collect garbage from Lake Brome.
30 divers and volunteers participated in the daylong event, which collected 500 kilos of trash from the lake bottom.
According to a press release from CLB, the divers brought up all kinds of waste, most of which had been underwater for many years. Multiple tires, 250 stubby beer and old Coca-Cola bottles, jars, anchors, four pairs of sunglasses a 150-pound head of an old 6-cylinder motor were among the items pulled from the lake.
Starting in front of the Boat Club and working past Douglass Beach in the morning, the divers said they found the area quite clean. In the afternoon, they focused their efforts around Eagle Island, where years of beer bottles and junk had been discarded.
In a statement about the recent garbage collection, Anne-Marie Lussier, co-founder of Faison Notre Part, a group of divers from Shawinigan explained that removing all the waste from lakes and rivers is impossible. “What matters is educating people so that they change their behaviour. People have to know that waste, invisible from the surface, does not disappear. Our divers are always amazed that magnificent lakes have been treated like public dumps,” Lussier commented.
Saturday’s dive was the 12 for Faison Notre Part, which estimates it has removed a total of 16,000 kilos of garbage from lakes across Quebec.
