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Community comes together for annual clean-up, barbecue

Beautiful weather last week saw Stettler and area residents tidying the community of winter detritus during the annual Earth Week Clean-up.
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Chris Van Somer

Beautiful weather last week, April 18-22, saw Stettler and area residents out in force tidying the community of winter detritus during the annual Earth Week Clean-up.

The annual clean-up event sees businesses, groups and individuals come out throughout the week to clean up what the melted winter snow reveals.

Organizer Karen Sernecky said that it's not that Stettler people are messy.

"Garbage cans can get full, garbage can blows around, cans knocked over, big trash bins, animals, from cars, etc.," she said. "It's not necessarily that people drop garbage. That's not how it happens."

The week ends with a free barbecue for the community in the No Frills parking lot, hosted by Newalta. This year the group went with hamburgers, with Tim Hortons donating timbits and coffee.

"(This year was) fantastic," Sernecky said. "Most of our areas we had on the list were signed up for and taken care of, and extra areas our town staff went to pick up bags. People were just getting out and cleaning up."

The event is held as a beautification committee initiative.

For the second year, the event was promoted using posters made by students, with Bailey Webb's poster winning the contest.

"It was a hard decision, but we picked the one that kinda 'popped' the most," Sernecky said. "They were all great posters. The kids always do a great job with it."

Originally the clean-up was an Earth Day event, but Sernecky and other organizers found that it was hard to get people out on that day. They changed it to earth week, so people could go any time they wanted throughout the week, depending on their schedules and the weather.