Senior Volunteers Tackle Environmental Problems

Transcript

(Sound of bird)
JORDAN: Seventy six year old Ivan Pettit is officially retired from his job as an environmental regulator, but he hasnít stopped monitoring streams, promoting recycling, and solving a nagging safety issue in his state.
(Sound of walking)

JORDAN: On a sunny day in Oil Creek State Park in northeast PA, he drops a stone down a corroded pipe.

PETTIT: Okay, go.
(Sound of rattling, splash)

JORDAN: Pettit is estimating the depth of this remnant of an old oil well. Itís one of thousands of abandoned oil wells in this region. The wells date as far back as 1859. Pettit and a team of senior volunteers regularly hunt for old wells. The seniors' work improves water quality and safety for hikers and hunters, and Pettit says it helps keeps him fit.

PETTIT: It is work that I have always enjoyed doing as well as getting you outdoors and being able to observe the things thatís going on around you, that is not a sedentary task whatsoever."
Pettit belongs to the national Environmental Alliance for Senior Involvement. The group claims members as young as fifty-five. Pennsylvania has the third highest number of residents older than sixty among U.S. states. Its active Senior Environmental Corps is touted as a national model, and has been honored by the United Nations Environmental Program.

But senior groups across the nation are working on environmental problems. In Cape Cod, they monitor West Nile virus. Seniors clean hazardous waste sites in Indiana. Michigan volunteers install solar water heaters on poor peoplesí homes.
It's a fast growing program. In 1993, 26 older adults made up the Senior Environment Corps. A decade later, over 100 thousand were involved in work across the country.
Ivan Pettit's work looking for old oil wells is the kind of effort that makes a real difference. Besides being a hazard for hikers and hunters, some of the old wells seep oil into the ground and it gets into streams.

(Sound of forest)
Every other week, from spring to fall, the well hunters line up horizontally, twenty feet apart, and comb a section of forest. Some well holes are several feet across and twenty feet deep. Others have narrow openings, but drop as deep as a thousand feet. Evelyn Kolojejchick and her husband John lead Ivan Pettit and other volunteers in seeking out the wells and marking coordinates.

VOLUNTEERS: "Ok, longitude is?"
"Seventy-Nine."

JORDAN: For both Evelyn and John Kolojejchick, well-hunting and other environmental projects are an extension of teaching high school science for thirty years. Evelyn once aimed to spark interest in many young minds. Now she feels sheís working on a smaller scale, but hopes to remain effective.

KOLOJEJCHICK: I belong to Audubon, used to belong to a lot of other environmental organizations and it just seemed like you needed... you needed to do something that was going to make a difference. I never had any money to donate to all of these causes and you just you know, you want to do something that an individual can do.

JORDAN: Seniors have seen results of well-hunting. They found sensitive species in a stream that had once been polluted. Several oil wells nearby had been sealed with cement to keep acid mine drainage out of the water.

KOLOJEJCHICK: The first year we tested it for aquatic life, there was almost nothing there. And yesterday when we were there, we had better diversity in that stream than we have in some of our streams that we test all along that we know donít have those kinds of problems. So they have made a significant difference on that stream by plugging those wells. Itís remarkable.

JORDAN: And it's the kind of reward that these senior citizen volunteers had hoped for: making a difference in their part of the world.

For The Allegheny Front, Iím Jennifer Szweda Jordan.