Over a hundred volunteers showed up to don safety vests and work gloves for a day of picking up foreign objects debris (FOD) at JFK Airport.
This annual clean-up brought Vaughn College students, airport service companies, airline personnel and Port Authority people together to work a couple of areas near the tarmac to remove potentially dangerous objects. Deputy General Manager for JFK, John Selden opened up the meeting before the actual work and stressed how important ridding the area of any kind of objects that could potentially flatten an airplane tire, or find it’s way in into an engine, much like the Captain Sully flight in the Hudson River suffered a few years ago after a bird strike.
He thanked all the participants and let Teresa Rizzuto take over as Operations Manager. Joe Clabby of CLPA supervised, Robbyn Stewart handled logistics for the event with Otha Ward, a student intern, worked to make sure all the volunteers understood what to pick up and how to dispose of the items.
Cleaners worked with the port Authority maintenance department and Royal Waste for providing the trash bins. People were having fun being slightly competitive with the debris they found of
old tires, bolts, piece of metal, wood, and even a tree trunk that were removed. A couple of old ULD’s , cargo bins, were also trashed. All in all, it was a hot temperature but successful day making the airport areas safer.
The goal of the day was to beat the poundage of debris from 2017. Joe Clabby reported after a day or so of weighing the garbage that the group exceeded the last year figure by 24 pounds! Congrats all!
