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anemptytextlline
I’m Ronald Mixon Sr., President of Warriors For Clean Water. I have been working for the last 25 years to bring needed attention to the toxic poisonous releases into The Tennessee River.
The river has been a special part of my life style for over 60 years. I’ve had a boat in the river since I was 14 years old. When I was in high school I either fished or duck hunted in the morning before school or in the afternoons.
The Decatur Daily, our hometown newspaper, has pictures of me hunting and fishing when I was a young man, if combined it would be a book. I was one of the owners of The Alabama Star riverboat. It wasn’t until I started diving for mussels, that I realized how bad the river really was. I was the Chairman of the Board for the mussel association. That was over 24 years ago. We didn’t incorporate or seek any legal status. We foolishly thought that the State of Alabama and ADEM would want to help! We were looked at as low class trash, even though many of us were highly educated, and most of us had Native American heritage. We warned them that they were killing the river ! We also had a publicized dive, bringing up dying mussels and even mussels on the endangered species list. We were told that they were going to be sent off to identify which species they were. When we called back a few weeks later they informed us that our samples had gotten lost! This was a very discouraging time for us. Because it was evident that absolutely nothing was going to be done to stop the standard operating procedure. They were going to concentrate their efforts into silencing all efforts, to bring the toxic state of the river to the public eye. We knew then that these practices, if allowed to continue would kill our river! Many of us feel now, that we have failed our children and grandchildren. By our apathy and by allowing ourselves to be pacifist, that our river will be unusable for our children and our grandchildren. The pictures below are just a few of my special memories, my oldest son,one of my grandsons and my 95 year old father. I can’t put an actual cost on the loss of this for my family.