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RALEIGH – More than 200 volunteers came out Saturday to help clean up over 50 miles of the Neuse River from the Falls Dam in North Raleigh to the Smithfield Town Commons in Johnston County.

“We rely on this river every single day for drinking water, for recreation, for beauty, but it doesn't have a maid,” Alissa Bierma, of the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation, said.

The recent rains caused the river level to rise, so volunteers weren’t able to put canoes and kayaks in the river this year.

“It just surprised to see how high it is. I can understand why the cleanup is not taking place on the river today,” Nancy Knight, a volunteer, said.

Knight, from Apex, was just one volunteer who was ready to get her hands dirty. But it looked like there wasn’t much to clean up. And some volunteers agreed.

“I've been pretty impressed in this particular put in that it's quite clean,” Debra Rezeli, who volunteers for the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation, said.

The volunteers’ main focus was on land this year.

“There are a lot of little pieces of plastic, and some beer bottles and a lot of cigarettes,” Katherine Lochbaum, a 17-year-old volunteer, said. “It's really bad for our environment.”

Tires and other strange trash are common. But volunteers said they run into surprises every once in a while.

“Last year, someone found a jar which contained $600,” Rezeli said. “Yeah, so that goes down in the record as the craziest thing found in the river,”

To help out in the effort, the cities of Raleigh and Smithfield provided garbage trucks and staff to remove the trash. Wake and Johnston counties also waived the landfill fees.