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ARCHDALE — The way Jerry Boyles  figured it, you could start a business with all the junk floating in Muddy Creek near his home in northern Randolph County.

“We’ve got stuff in here that Walmart hasn’t got,” Boyles said of the trash pool backed up on this northwestern tip of the Randleman Regional Reservoir.  “We could stock (a store) from A to Z.”

The waste pile just upstream from Canter Road  accumulated since the reservoir was filled a couple years ago, said Boyles and neighbors Melvin Canter and Roger Shumate.

Until a cleanup crew arrived Thursday morning, the mess included an array of such urban discards as plastic bottles, empty containers of antifreeze and motor oil, aerosol cans, tires, a tire rim, a metal chair, sporting goods from basketballs and footballs to a volleyball, and even what appeared to be a squirrel lawn ornament.

“Before they built Randle-man Lake, there used to be a bridge here,” Canter said, adding that the bridge was replaced by a culvert or tunnel-like structure under the roadbed.

Unlike the bridge it replaced, he said, the new configuration acts like a strainer, preventing floating trash from traveling further into the lake.

Reservoir officials learned about the trash problem about the same time as the News & Record earlier this week; they do not believe it accumulated over such a long period, said John Kime,  executive director of the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority.

Most of the log-jammed trash probably stems from recent rains that left the lake 3 feet higher than normal, flushing litter into Muddy Creek’s many small tributaries, Kime theorized.

“The good part of something like this is it ought to be a lesson to people: Look, guys, don’t litter because it all ends up in our lake,” Kime said, adding that the authority has an active education program to make people more conscious of litter problems.

The reservoir is expected to become a source of drinking water for thousands of people across the region later this year, after completion of its water treatment plant.

The waste pile might have been caused by a logjam or some other blockage inside the new culvert, Kime said.

Most of the waste apparently originated in and around Archdale, which drains into Muddy Creek and its branches. The creek grows into one of the reservoir’s two arms as it flows south. The reservoir spans more than 3,000 acres  and has a 170-square-mile  watershed all the way to Kernersville.

“I’m really saddened about it, but I don’t know anything we can do other than going out regularly as we do to collect litter,” Jerry Yarborough,  Archdale’s city manager,  said of his community’s role in the mess.

Problems with stream litter are not Archdale’s alone. Muddy Creek’s woes are part of a larger mosaic that involves huge volumes of litter plaguing most urban streams, including North and South Buffalo  creeks in Greensboro.

But Canter Road is on a regional bike route that attracts large numbers of riders. Imagine their impression of Randolph County and the reservoir after spotting a floating trash pile amid the otherwise beautiful rural landscape, Shumate said.

The water authority wants to know of all such problems on the reservoir and will respond quickly, Kime said.

The authority had about eight people working on the Canter Road cleanup within a day of being alerted. All trash will be removed and taken to the landfill, Kime said.

After the lake’s water level subsides, the authority will examine the culvert under Canter Road to make sure it is working properly, Kime said. 

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com