In honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, Johnson Engineering employees took part in cleaning up the City of Fort Myers’ canals. The company has adopted Carrell Canal as part of the City’s Adopt-a-Canal initiative. This kick off event will be followed by quarterly clean ups of Carrell Canal for the next two years. The firm made this commitment because of its deep roots in the community dating back more than 64 years. The firm has worked, in one capacity or another, on all of the canals in this program throughout its long history and wanted to do their part to give back to the community.

The program began as a way to decrease the amount of litter that flows through the City’s municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4) ultimately affecting the Caloosahatchee River. The City selected 10 canals covering 12 miles of waterways.

During the mornings clean up efforts, the volunteers collected 42 bags of debris totaling over 1000 gallons of trash for the one mile stretch of canal. Employee volunteers found a large amount of typical items such as styrofoam cups, cans, bottles and plastic bags and some unusual items such as a couch, lawn furniture, clothing, shoes, a bicycle, traffic cone, basketball, football, steel angle iron and wood.