Meet the Star Wars St. Cloud Storm Drains

ADOPT A DRAIN MINNESOTA

A few weeks ago, my Co Host Pete Hanson told me that he adopted a storm drain in his neighborhood. I was like...what are you talking about?! How do you "Adopt" a storm drain..and why would you?

Basically, Pete and his cute dog GiGi pick up trash when they go for walks anyway, and Pete's the kind of guy that; if he sees something that needs to be done..he just does it. No questions asked. He's made me start thinking about some simple things I could do too. Why not? It's like...if the garbage can is full...empty it. Don't wait for someone else to do it. If it needs to be done, just do it.

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So I went home... in search of storm drains near my home. My family is called "The Rebel Alliance..." and although there aren't any storm drains directly in front of our house, there are four storm drains that live nearby...so we adopted the drain closest to us and named it Yoda. I drove from home from work yesterday, opened my garage door, grabbed my garden gloves, a plastic bag and my broom, and headed down the street to Yoda. In less than 10 minutes, Yoda was looking nice and clean.

So I looked across the street and saw the poor dirty storm drain in front of my neighbors house...all sad, and looking like it wanted to be cleaned too. So I walked across the street and cleaned that one up too.

Then...I looked further down the street and saw these two drains. Although I haven't cleaned them yet, I thought, Yep. We need to adopt our storm drain children. So I went home and adopted the one across from Yoda, and then the other two nearby, and named them Chewy, R2D2 and C3PO.

As you can see, there's not much that needs to be done. Bring a broom, your gloves, a garbage bag, and clean it up. I figured... in less than 20 minutes, we could have all of the storm drains in our neighborhood in good shape.

See what a difference it makes by each one of us just adopting a nearby storm drain and keeping it clean by clicking HERE now.

If you have kids, it's a great way to teach them how to give back and help keep your community clean.  If you decide to do this as a family, please be careful as you are working on streets, and we want to make sure your children are safe.

You can also report each time you clean a storm drain, and enter the poundage of what was cleaned out of the drain, and what most of the debris is from; whether it's dirt, grass, leaves, garbage, etc. So far, 219 drains have been adopted, with 128 people adopting them, and a total of 949 pounds of debris has been collected. That's a bunch of crap that we kept from entering our Mississippi River. Go Team!