Beach cleaner tested here

Beach goers will notice the sand is a little cleaner at Jamestown Reservoir. Cherrington Enterprises put on a demonstration of its beach- cleaning equipment for its staff Wednesday.

“It picks up the surface of the beach, filters out the debris and drops the sand to the beach,” said Corey Struble, administrative services manager for Cherrington. “It can pick out cigarette butts, rocks, sea shells. It picks up hazards on the beach like nails left behind from a bonfire.”

On the Jamestown Reservoir beach it mostly removed rocks of varying sizes along with some bottle caps, fireworks debris and a few seashells.

It can also be looked at as being similar to a farm rock picker designed to handle smaller stones in sand, Struble said.

“It’s the same technology as the rock pickers but applied differently,” said Mac McPherson, owner of Cherrington Enterprises. “Most ideas for good equipment come from farmers.”

McPherson had operated the Glenmac Company in Jamestown from 1976 to 2005. The company manufactured the Harley line of rock pickers and power rakes. He sold Glenmac in 2005 to Palladin Brands Holding, which moved the manufacturing operation out of Jamestown in 2007.

Cherrington Enterprises is headquartered in Jamestown while the equipment is manufactured in Clarissa, Minn.

“We’re kind of a strange company,” McPherson said. “Sitting in the middle of the continent selling beach equipment.”

The equipment is sold all over the world and used for a variety of tasks. The equipment has been used on beaches in Japan, Mexico and in the Middle East, among other places.

“Sod farmers also use the equipment,” Struble said. “It picks up the rocks in the top soil after they’ve taken off the sod and before they plant the new grass.”

Other uses include sand traps at golf courses and landscape seedbed preparation.

The equipment found a new use during Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, cleaning oil off of soiled beaches.

“We spent a year with BP (British Petroleum) in Louisiana,” McPherson said. “We had six machines working for 51 weeks.”

The Cherrington equipment was brought to Grand Isle, La., because that was where the worst of the oil was washing ashore, McPherson said.

The company not only brought in equipment but people to operate it because of worker shortages in the area.

“We were the first ones in and the last ones out,” he said. “It was a good experience. Our guys were the heroes of the place.”

Sun reporter Keith Norman can be reached at 701-952-8452 or by email at knorman@jamestownsun.com

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