Party's over. Time for cleaning up after fireworks bash

Hilary Penner's alarm went off at 7:30 a.m. Sunday.

The Palmer Lake woman threw on some jeans, grabbed work gloves, tiptoed past her houseguests and, without coffee, spent the rest of her morning diving into trash cans.

"Clearly people are lazy," she said as she fished nonrecyclable trash out of a recycling container. "Clearly."

Penner joined about a dozen other volunteers Sunday morning who were working to pick up after Palmer Lake's Fourth of July celebration.

As the biggest celebration of the year in the town, it draws thousands of people to enjoy the festivities and watch the fireworks. Unfortunately, it also draws their trash.

At 8 a.m., volunteers were already hard at work picking up every bottle, every burned-out firework, every leftover piece of fry bread that was covered with mud and flattened and torn by tire wheels.

Trash cans were overflowing and oozing with the leftovers of dinner the night before. Pizza boxes were piled next to them, tentatively balancing on top of Styrofoam takeout containers.

"By later on today, you won't even know that we just had a Fourth of July celebration," said Della Gray, the Palmer Lake town clerk, who is also on the fireworks committee. "Everything will be cleaned up."

Penner and Shawn Cash help run Palmer Lake's recycling program and were excited this year when the fireworks committee asked them to put out trash cans for guests to throw out their plastic and aluminum containers.

They had 10 95-gallon trash cans at the event and figured they would fill the back of a truck with 950 gallons of recyclables. They envisioned tying a canopy over the top because there would be so many recyclables to haul away.

Penner lifted up a 30-gallon trash bag, half full.

"This is the aluminum we've got," she said.

She held up another half-full bag.

"This is the plastic," she said. "It's a little depressing."

Just across the parking lot, volunteer Carol DeBlois was finding all of those missing recyclable containers.

"I guess people didn't bother to recycle them," she said. "Or throw them in a trash can."

DeBlois is also on the fireworks committee and has been helping with the cleanup for the past three years.

She was wearing old shoes, yellow rubber gloves and a Palmer Lake fireworks show T-shirt.

She'll do almost anything to help out, she said, but she has limits.

"I'm not touching the food," she said. "Someone else or nature will have to take care of that."

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Call the writer at 636-0274.