02/07/2012 - One Mile Creek Update

This is an update on the continuing saga of One Mile Creek where I filed a complaint about illegal trash dumped in the water and on six parcels of land adjacent to One Mile Creek. The complaint was emailed to about three dozen agencies and environmental groups, including news media. It's been almost two months since the complaints went out, hence the update. Here are new photos taken today in One Mile Creek, Three Mile Creek, and Mobile River. No one has done a damn thing to remove the trash, some of which is hazardous.

The latest development is ADEM's Solid Waste Branch personnel inspected the parcels of land identified in the complaint and saw no active unauthorized dumping but did conclude the solid wastes appear to be the result of roadside litter drainage. ADEM further adds, "litter shall not constitute an unauthorized dump." The Solid Waste Branch of ADEM has referred the complaints to ADEM's Water Division because the complaint does involve potential impacts to waters of the State. No word from the ADEM's Water Division yet.

In a nutshell, the municipal solid wastes you see in the following photos are deemed okay by the Solid Waste Branch of Alabama's Department of Environmental Management. They see no reason to get involved. They see no reason to clean up the trash. Even though there are visible piles of tires, according to ADEM, the tires were piled there by stormwater. Mosquito breeding tire dumps are okay with ADEM.

ADEM never responded to my concern about the old Hickory Street Landfill and lack of testing in the wetlands according to the Superfund site assessment report. The report recommended Mobile fence off the site but there is no perimeter fence in place with warning signs to alert people to the dangers of the hazardous material filled landfill whose cap has been compromised according to the report. Mum is the word on this superfund site.

BP is held accountable for their pollution of the Gulf of Mexico while Mobile continues to pollute local urban waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, unabated. You can't get on an airplane with six ounces of shampoo for safety reasons, but it is safe to dump your full oil and gas containers into the water along with plastics that according to NOAA, most will never biodegrade. Go figure...

Alabama State Port Authority shoreline.

One Mile Creek flower beautification program. Note the recyclable planter.

New flowers growing in recyclable Styrofoam.

Shoreline trash.

Shoreline trash.

Shoreline trash.

Shoreline trash.

Mosquito breeding tire dump. ADEM looked it over and said, "I don't see any active illegal dumping here." Which is why I say, "ADEM:  Alabama Department of Environmental Mismanagement."

ADEM: "Litter distributed by storm water runoff does not constitute an unauthorized dump." ADEM's Solid Waste Management division doesn't care about this hazardous solid waste.

Unfortunately, Mobile and ADEM have ignored the trash in One Mile Creek for so long that the creek bed is full of trash too. For every turtle you see, there are 1,000s of pieces of trash in the creek bed.

One Mile Creek flows into Three Mile Creek. Three Mile Creek shoreline looks good from this viewpoint, but looks are deceiving.

This is what Three Mile Creek looks like directly behind the (ASPA) shoreline vegetation in the above photo. It is only litter, not an unauthorized trash dump according to ADEM. This is legal.

Three Mile Creek flows into Mobile River. Here is the shoreline of Mobile River.

Guess where most of this trash came from? Three Mile Creek.

From here Mobile's litter continues on into Mobile Bay

and finally into the Gulf of Mexico to land on

Alabama's precious beaches that it claims to care so much about.