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Lions scrap metal drive officially starts Wednesday

  • The Charles City Lions Club will be holding a scrap metal drive starting Wednesday. Anyone can bring scrap metal to Denny’s Recycling, on 13th Avenue in Charles City, Wednesday through Saturday, June 19-22. Hours Wednesday through Friday will be from 1-7 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Press photo James Grob.)

  • The Charles City Lions Club will be holding a scrap metal drive starting Wednesday. Anyone can bring scrap metal to Denny’s Recycling, on 13th Avenue in Charles City, Wednesday through Saturday, June 19-22. Hours Wednesday through Friday will be from 1-7 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Press photo James Grob.)

  • The Charles City Lions Club will be holding a scrap metal drive starting Wednesday. Anyone can bring scrap metal to Denny’s Recycling, on 13th Avenue in Charles City, Wednesday through Saturday, June 19-22. Hours Wednesday through Friday will be from 1-7 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Press photo James Grob.)

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By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

The first-ever Charles City Lions Club scrap metal drive started much sooner — and more suddenly — than expected.

Thank the Memorial Day tornado for that.

The official start date for the scrap metal drive is Wednesday, and it will run through Saturday. Anyone can bring scrap metal to Denny’s Recycling, on 13th Avenue in Charles City. Hours Wednesday through Friday will be from 1-7 p.m., and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

“There’s a yellow tub here, and a few black ones to help them put the stuff in,” said Denny Tynan, of Denny’s Recycling. “There are going to be Lions Club members here to help and direct.”

Tynan said people should bring their metal to the south side of the business. Denny’s Recycling will have four 40-yard “bottomless” dumpsters, a 30-foot, 10-ton telehandler, a 10-ton end loader with forks and two skid loaders.

“We’re going to keep everything on the south side of the road,” he said. “There are scales there for the bigger and heavier stuff.”

This is the first time the Lions Club has held a scrap metal drive in Charles City, and before the preparations were even complete, a tornado rolled through the Floyd County Fairgrounds, leaving piles of scrap metal in its wake.

The EF-1 tornado smashed through the Floyd County Fairgrounds on Memorial Day, taking down several buildings and damaging others.

“The tornado heavily damaged many outbuildings at the fairgrounds as it moved northeast, but missed the city,” the NWS report said. “The fairgrounds sustained high-end EF-1 damage.

At a Floyd County Board of Supervisors meeting in early June, supervisor Linda Tjaden said the county is fortunate, because the Charles City Lions Club happened to be in the middle of a scrap metal drive as a fundraiser, and took care of the metal scrap that was generated by the tornado damage.

Tjaden said that Tynan “really stepped up to the plate and helped with all that metal.”

“It was just appropriate to grab all that,” Tynan said.

Tynan said that following the tornado, people started bringing in their scrap metal, donating it to the Lions.

“There was one guy who brought in a ton-and-a-half or more from halfway to Colwell, and all of the scrap came from the fairgrounds,” Tynan said. “He said, ‘just give it to the Lions.’”

The metal had been lifted from the fairgrounds by the tornado and “dropped from the sky.”

“He said he was working 100 yards away from it in the field when it dropped,” Tynan said. “He didn’t know whose it was, and I said, ‘I can tell you where it came from, it matches all those pieces from the fairgrounds I have out back.’”

Other pieces were brought from Floyd County Ag, across the street from the fairgrounds.

Lions Club President Russell Schwarz said the scrap metal drive is a fundraising project to raise money for Lions Club donation gifts to the community and to support other projects.

“We’ll take almost anything that’s got metal on it,” Schwarz said. “Boats, kitchen appliances — if people have weight sets in their basements, or old treadmills they want to get rid of, we’ll take them.”

Items accepted include flat screen TVs, computers, printers and laptops; home appliances such as stoves, refrigerators, freezers and microwaves; bikes, trikes, toys, tools and metal toolboxes; grills, playground sets, patio furniture and fire pits; exercise equipment such as weight sets and treadmills; office equipment such as filing cabinets, metal shelves and staplers; fencing, posts, gates, wire and pipes; vehicles and trailers; engines, motors, toppers and gearboxes; old farm implements, feeders and bunks; metal boats, boat motors and docks. No garbage or loose tires will be accepted, no non-metal boats, no campers and no motorhomes.

The Lions Club takes part in several community projects throughout the year, and the money raised from the scrap metal drive will finance some of them.

Among many other local projects and donations to the school district, the Lions also operate an eyeglass and hearing aid dropbox, the club raises American flags to decorate Central Park and yards in the community on patriotic holidays, Lions offer free vision screenings for preschoolers, and the club holds a fly-in pancake breakfast at the airport every summer and a used book sale every fall.

“It’s a good cause for the Lions. We’ll use it to do everything the Lions do,” Tynan said. “I joined last November and I think it’s a good group.”

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