Seward comes together to clean up after Fourth of July celebration

SEWARD, Neb. (KLKN) — After a day full of fun, Seward woke up to another tradition: cleaning up.

“It’s not a bad thing, it’s nothing hard, it’s just what we do,” Michael Miers said.

Community members hit the streets with trash bags and trucks to restore the city after a successful Fourth of July parade.

Volunteers include the Seward Scouts, Seward High School’s FFA club, the Skills USA club and many more.

Miers, who has been helping to clean the streets for decades, said it’s more than keeping things tidy; it’s about honoring the city’s Fourth of July celebration.

“It’s been 42 years for me. Would’ve been another year but I was overseas,” he said. “We just come out in the morning, 6 o’clock. Pick up all the barrels, barricades, no parking signs that we put out for the parade route, things like that. Get it all cleaned up and go home.”

He said it does take a while, but it’s a community-wide effort that’s worth it in the long run.

“Takes a couple of hours,” he said. “Parks and Rec usually does the band show and the fireworks, so they pick up a lot of trash. But most of the stuff I do is barrels and all the barricades. We put out about 100 barricades and pick all that stuff up that way, we don’t have to do it Monday when we come back to work and the town’s back to normal.”

And after it’s back to normal, the City of Seward plans to do it all again next year.