05/02/2012 - Upper Dog River Litter Woes 4

From April 21 to April 28 (2012) there was a massive cleanup effort specifically targeting the upper Dog River watershed by the Great American Cleanup, Keep Mobile Beautiful, Partners for Environmental Progress, the City of Mobile, Mobile Baykeeper, Alabama PALS, Dog River Clearwater Revival, Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, Holcim, Associated General Contractors, Envision Coastal Alabama, Burlington Coat Factory, HandsOn South Alabama, and Mobile Gas. Hundreds of volunteers removed trash from the private property of Springdale Mall and the City of Mobile property along Eslava Creek by the Malls.

Four days after the cleanup - below are scenes of a littered upper Dog River after a heavy rain on May 2, 2012. A Four-hour cleanup to remove a year's worth of litter is not effective to stop the accumulation of public trash in local waterways after heavy rains.

Since authorities are not holding people accountable for keeping their property litter free like the Code of Mobile says, the public litter either needs to be strategically trapped where it accumulates and removed after heavy rains or there needs to be workers deployed in boats after heavy rains to manually remove the storm water litter. What is Mobile doing? Absolutely nothing that is effective. Last I heard the City of Mobile paid over $42,000 for a 141 page document that outlines about 425 goals to address their management of Storm Waters. Talk is cheap. I measure the effectiveness of Mobile's litter control with photos and a video camera.

Meantime, despite years of complaints by Dog River residents, and a recent threat of a lawsuit by Dog River Clearwater Revival, there is still zero effort by the City to trap litter and there is still zero city workers removing litter from local waterways (that I am aware of). For everyone to keep ignoring the public garbage in the waterways is the same as promoting the pollution of the waterways. Someone should be fired.

Header image is a photo of the shoreline that was litter free when I paddled by it the other day. Now we have to wait till the Coastal Cleanup in September to get this trash removed because not a single agency gives a Rattus norvegicus' anus enough to do something about getting the garbage removed from Mobile's waterways.

Now Don to clean the shoreline again.

Litter is abundant along the shoreline in Dog River just east of Dog River Park.

The litter was also visible well downstream of Dog River Park. The sources of the litter in these photos were Eslava Creek, Bolton Branch, and all the feeder tributaries to those creeks like the Interstate I-10 ditches.

A short YouTube video from this evenings kayak trip through the garbage dump. Jonsey's top priority of preserving the historic beauty of the city through strict litter enforcement is apparently not getting much priority. Museums seem to be a much higher priority than clean water.