Campus Connection

12 years of keeping Riverside Park safe

  La Crosse area college students will commemorate 12 successful years of Operation: River Watch — the volunteer program that has curtailed drownings around Riverside Park.   Students from UW-La Crosse, Viterbo University and Western Technical College will host “The Operation: River Watch Commemorative Event” at 2 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in the Radisson Hotel. The event is open to all; coffee and snacks will be provided.   Operation: River Watch began in October 2006 as a response to drownings near Riverside Park. Through the watch, students from the three area colleges volunteer to patrol Riverside Park to watch for anyone who may mistakenly be heading toward the Mississippi River. The operation runs from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. every Thursday, Friday and Saturday during the academic year. Watch times are split into two shifts for volunteers to choose from: 11 p.m.-1 a.m. and 1 a.m.-3 a.m. Some elect to volunteer the entire time. [caption id="attachment_51426" align="alignleft" width="300"] Daniel Potter, a UWL history education major, is the current director of Operation: River Watch.[/caption] Daniel Potter, a UWL history education major and current director of Operation: River Watch, replied to questions about the award-winning volunteer program. Q. How did Operation: River Watch get started? A. The UWL Student Senate was the driving force to create Operation River Watch in 2006. UWL’s Sigma Tau Gamma – Beta Kappa was the first organization to come forward to lead the initiative. Since October 2006, the fraternity has always held a leadership role in ORW as either director or campus representative.   Q. How many students serve as volunteers? A. We try to split up every weekend of the academic year along with out-of-season weekends equally. We average around a minimum of two volunteers per day for regular weekend coverage. At a minimum, we have around 700 volunteers every academic year among the three colleges. For Oktoberfest, we have about 75 volunteers per day.   Q. How many interaction incidents occur? A. Incidents vary year-to-year. The highest amount of interactions was 1,200 in the first year of operation. This academic year, we have had 354 encounters so far, with just over 100 during Oktoberfest weekend. Since 2006, we have had around 50 people referred to La Crosse Police, but this is a rarity since people are very respectful when we approach them and ask them to leave the park.   Q. Who sponsors Operation River Watch? A. We do not have habitual sponsors, but we have received money backing from the Tavern League when we first started, and recently received money from a local Rotary Club. Other sources of funding come from organizational fundraising. The Radisson Hotel has been more than gracious for allowing us to use their facility as a break building for volunteers when it is cold, as well as a place to store our sign-in materials. Otherwise, everything is operated by the student executives of the organization.   Q. What’s the outlook for the volunteer organization? A. Despite administration from all of the universities thinking this would be a short-lived organization, ORW has empowered the students as volunteers and executives to change the community. It is hard to tell which interactions could have saved a life or lives, but having students help fellow students has created a softer net for diverting individuals from Riverside Park. Seeing faces of same age and status in the community can make people more compliant to do the right thing and turn around. It has been and always will be about keeping the community steer away from tragedy. With the hard work from UWL, and with the current leadership from Andrew Kyle at Viterbo and John Haneke at Western Technical College and their students, we have not had an issue in Riverside Park since October 2006. ORW also gives the students a unique experience to have some tickets they received while drinking expunged. ORW takes in university-mandated and judicial-mandated people to serve along with other volunteers. This allows those participants to see both sides of the coin when it comes to unapproved behaviors in the community regarding drinking or other misconduct. Our previous UWL advisor, Ingrid Peterson, stepped down at the end of December. Zachariah Pfeifer has recently stepped into the position has done an amazing job.   Find out more about Operation: River Watch. See a video about ORW.