Capt. Bill Sheehan is Hackensack Riverkeeper. With his trademark shades and khaki-colored hat, it’s easy to pick him out of a crowd. But behind the man is a team that shares Sheehan’s passion, people with as much conviction and determination to transform the once-polluted river into the oasis it was intended to be.
Last Saturday in Hackensack’s Johnson Park, volunteers and residents had the opportunity to see the team in action. As one of Hackensack Riverkeeper’s final programs of the 2007 season, staff and dozens of participants spent a good portion of the day cleaning the park and ridding the area and surrounding waters of debris and other forms of pollution.
The park, which has been a recent target of city and county rejuvenation projects, has become a popular destination point for all county residents. Its transformation into a scenic walking and recreation area is due in part to the efforts of Hackensack Riverkeeper’s River Cleanup Program.
“It’s a really nice park, the city does a great job maintaining it,” said Hackensack Riverkeeper’s Operations Director Lisa Ryan, who started the river cleanups seven years ago.
“This is our second time in Johnson Park, and its one of our more successful cleanups. There is a lot of garbage behind the businesses along the water.”
Cleanups at Johnson Park attract between 50 and 70 volunteers.

Cleaning up
When Hackensack Riverkeeper started 10 years ago, Sheehan wanted to develop a river clean-up program but lacked the manpower, or in this case, womanpower. Soon after Ryan joined, Sheehan gave her the clean-up endeavor.
“It’s now one of our more visible events,” said Ryan.
“We get a lot of interest from schools. We help a lot with them and do some corporate cleanups, too, but we have to limit it to some degree. We schedule everything in the beginning of the season but we just get so busy.”
These events typically take place along the water’s edge, save one or two corporate programs. Once on site, volunteers grab a steaming hot cup of coffee or a bottle of water and stretch previously unused muscles. While discarded soda cans and fast food hamburger wrappers are easy to retrieve, the occasional truck tire or shopping cart might present a struggle if it requires extrication from the river.
For four hours, participants use shovels, rakes and their bare (or gloved) hands to toss trash into bags, which are usually filled rather quickly. Volunteers do get dirty, but Riverkeeper staff members stand side by side with them and pick the garbage, too.
Other volunteers ride the Hackensack River in canoes with hopes of removing any trash that has drifted out onto the water. Empty beverage bottles and soccer balls, even clearly labeled biopsy exams, are picked out of the water, but volunteers in the past have found heavier objects such as car mufflers and engine parts.
They don’t find dinosaurs or mermaids, “but we have picked up refrigerators,” said Ryan.
“A lot of parks are built on old landfills, so people are finding that stuff. But most of it is just littler. On any given day, you can see someone on the turnpike chucking something out of his or her car. People keep their cars clean, but they don’t care about the environment.”
Johnson Park has been a popular location throughout the years, as have Overpeck Park in Leonia and Lincoln Park in Jersey City, among others.
“Overpeck is a former landfill. There’s just a never-ending supply of trash there,” said Ryan.