Feb 02 2008
What’s That Floating Over There?
I am beginning to believe that it might actually be more dangerous to live on the water.
My pal F just sent me this.
We’re still seeing tar balls and slicks from the Nov. 7 oil spill. And the marine life has definitely not recovered. And now, sickened by that, they’re having to contend with 2.7 million gallons of sewage. I haven’t seen anything particularly onerous floating here in the marina, but you know, they just don’t spread booms to protect us from sewage. It’s almost like everyone just turns their heads and whistles until it “goes away”.
There’s that term again. “Goes away”. People said that a lot after the Cosco Busan. As in, eventually, it’ll go away.
Nonsense, my friends. It won’t go away. It’ll dilute a little, maybe, but it won’t just go away because you want it to.
And statements like this one, from a different article on the spill, just crack me up. “County health officials are warning the public to avoid fishing or touching water in or around Richardson Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay that stretches between Tiburon and Sausalito.” Um, hello, the currents that rocket past Richardson Bay and around Angel Island through Raccoon Straits are some of the fastest in this Bay. This is just to the north of the main opening of the Bay to the sea… and you don’t think there’s, oh I dunno, going to be some mixing as the tides come in and out? There’s a reason that tidal mixing in this Bay is called “flushing”, people. A whole heckuva lot of gallons of water come both in, and out, every day. And they somehow think that the sewage wasn’t going to spread?
As a liveaboard, what absolutely cracks me up about this drama is that the Coast Guard requires padlocks, yes padlocks, my friends, on the valves in heads that have the option to adjust to flushing directly overboard. Because you know, the less than 100 of us that live in this Bay are somehow really dangerous, and we could be flushing our family’s waste directly into the water, and that’d be yukky, and we can’t be trusted to just know that or comply with it, so we have to have padlocks on those systems, to guarantee that our waste goes into the holding tank.
And here’s a fun economical/green footprint exercise. We pump our waste from the head to the tank. It sits there, we drive over to the pumpout station (using diesel fuel to run our engines, natch) and use the electrical pumpout station (using power from the marina) to pump out our tank. Then we drive back over to our dock (more diesel), having been good citizens. The sewage is dumped from the pumpout station into the municipal sewage pipes, run up to the plant, treated (more electricity used there)…
And apparently in heavy rains it’s fairly likely that it’s all gonna just get dumped straight back into the water anyway.
Yuck yuck yuck! If being pregnant won’t make me nauseated, this news sure does! Sorry you’re living in a cesspool, dude.
Yeah, it’s kind of like some sick joke… on us!