Nearly three months have passed since the pre-Christmas ice storm trashed the city, and work crews still haven’t finished picking up all the limbs that fell to the ground.

Work is expected to be completed in a week or two, city officials say, but even then, the city will still be a mess.

That’s because cleanup crews picked up only the big limbs. All the other crud that came falling down during the ice storm – the millions of little twigs, all the seed pods, an avalanche of tiny pieces of bark – remains on the ground, covering lawns, lining the streets, clogging sewer grates.

When the rains stop and temperatures rise, most people will get out and finish the job, spiffing up their yards and the streets in front of their homes.

The key word here is most.

All over the city are yards that are doomed to remain strewn with debris, largely because the people who live there don’t have the muscle to clean up the mess or the money to hire someone to do it for them.

Many of those same yards are still littered with large limbs, usually because the residents didn’t get them to the curb in time for pickup or haven’t been able to move them.

So NeighborLink Fort Wayne is trying to organize a citywide cleanup day in which volunteers will head out and clean up the remnants of the storm.

The cleanup day won’t happen until April 18, more than a month away, but the project requires substantial planning. The goal is to come up with a list of properties where owners need help with cleanup and to assemble at least 500 volunteers who can head out on that day and get the job done.

NeighborLink, which typically performs basic home maintenance for older adults, people with disabilities and low-income people who can’t do it themselves, largely relies on churches to assemble teams of volunteers to tackle various projects in their neighborhoods or in their areas of the city.

For the communitywide cleanup, the non-profit organization is calling on the community as a whole.

Usually, volunteers with NeighborLink start by going to the group’s Web site, www.nlfw.org, joining the organization and signing up. People who need help also sign up at the site.

For the community cleanup, though, NeighborLink is letting people call 710-7611 to volunteer. It is also taking requests for assistance at the phone number, and there are plenty of people seeking assistance.

“People are calling frantically, looking for help,” said Andrew Hoffman, executive director of NeighborLink.

“For this event, you don’t have to join and register as a volunteer. This is a special event,” Hoffman said, although people who want to join the organization can still do so.

About the beginning of April, NeighborLink will sort it all out, assemble volunteers into teams and match them with people who have requested help.

Volunteers can offer to take part in one project or several, Hoffman says.

If nothing else, Hoffman says, people can opt to take on projects themselves.

One thing for sure, the city is in dire need of a manicure, but performing the manicure isn’t that hard.