D'Olive Creek

Launched at Meaher Park for a paddle into D'Olive Creek.

One of my favorite trees near the Causeway is not looking too good.

But I found a new favorite.

The paddle into D'Olive Creek also known as Alligator Alley lived up to expectation. A good sized River Dawg led the way.

Dog River Escort

A sole dolphin gave me a 45 minute escort down Dog River. That was a special treat.

Sometimes the dolphin swam in front and sometimes on the side or behind.

Much of the dolphin was covered in a thick algae and it swam pretty slow.

eWaste Apathy

This is a broken computer monitor that has been sitting in the water 50 FEET away from Dog River Park in Mobile Alabama for YEARS. I have alerted the City of Mobile leaders, the State of Alabama, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and the US EPA to the fact that there is a hazardous television floating in the water in Dog River. That was in 2012. No one bothered to contact me or reply. Four years later and there are STILL a number CRT televisions floating in the watershed.

I thought documenting the dense pollution in Dog River (been doing it for 5 years) would provide local leaders an incentive to develop a program to address the pollution problem in the trashy Dog River watershed. My recommendation was and still is to get a litter boat working the watershed full time removing the trash. I mean, the City can afford to pay 2-3 dozen workers to mow grass, surely the City of Mobile cares enough about the public waterways their drainage system pollutes to dedicate at least one worker to keep it clean.

Hooray! Supposedly the City of Mobile now has a litter boat. So how is the City of Mobile's litter boat doing? I don't know because I have never seen a litter removal boat in action and the storm water trash is not being removed from the trashy shorelines in Dog River. This is a problem.

You see, not all trash is benign. Glass cathode ray tubes in old computer monitors and televisions, also called CRTs, contain several POUNDS of toxic lead. (1)

LEAD content in a CRT monitor can be as high as 20%, which means that one 34” television can contain up to 2.2 POUNDS of lead. Allowing this hazardous material to seep into soil and water systems can be extremely harmful to human health.(2)

If the monitor or screen gets broken then lead dust or cadmium dust can get out and that stuff is very, very toxic. (3)

Lead is only one of several toxins in old Televisions.

Sadly, there is still no one to call to get HAZARDOUS trash removed from Mobile waterways. I know because I've tried for years to get the trash removed from Dog River. The City of Mobile will not even keep their park shorelines free of trash. ADEM is useless to get the trash pollution removed from Dog River. The US EPA is just as useless. Gonna be a lot more cancer in the future as long as hazardous trash in public waterways is ignored after 5 years of complaints to the authorities.

So, enjoy your swim in Dog River and Mobile Bay because no one in Mobile or the State of Alabama or the Federal Government gives a shit what is floating in the watershed. Nor do the residents who live in the area.

(1) http://m.timesunion.com/business/article/After-Jan-1-Toxic-tubes-from-old-TVs-5986626.php

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25776743/

(3) http://www.post-gazette.com/local/2008/06/01/By-the-way-that-big-old-TV-is-really-toxic/stories/200806010187

Kayak launch sites in Mobile?

The shoreline of the Mobile Convention would make a decent kayak launch spot for Mobile River access. Instead this small and rare City of Mobile shoreline sits idle and remains lined with recyceable trash all year long. What a pathetic waste of a valuable City of Mobile waterfront asset.

This is the trashy Mobile Bay shoreline seen from the wooden walkway at the City of Mobile's Arlington Park. Arlington Park is an embarrassing black eye on the City of Mobile's promised committment to deal with its community storm water trash pollution. Ignore, ignore and ignore the waterfront trash pollution year after year is a clear indicator of lousy City of Mobile leadership and a community that absolutely does NOT give a shit about their community's polluted waterfront properties despite Lawsuits and Fines by environmental groups.

No wonder why the bayside boat and kayak launch at McNally Park is rarely used. No one seems to maintain this City of Mobile Park launch site.

As usual, the fishing pigs who use the City of Mobile's Helen Wood Park keep it littered with trash. What kayaker trusts parking and launching a kayak at a poorly maintained trashy park?

I did find one kayak launch site in Mobile that was free of trash. Sadly the Robinson Bayou launch site is rarely used because parking for the relatively new launch site is poorly marked.

The community of Mobile should be happy that I am not in charge of the City's waterfront parks. If I was in charge all the parks would be shut down until the community implemented a plan to keep the parks free of litter. People will never appreciate the things they have until they loose them. I can guarantee you if all the waterfront parks in Mobile became no trespassing zones there would be public outcry, especially from the boaters who no longer have places to launch the expensive boats.

City leaders should be clear what they expect from their community with regards to trash in parks. As long as City of Mobile leaders allows its community to freely litter City parks without any consequence to those violating the law, the fishing pigs and retards in Mobile who break the litter law will continue to do so unabated. The continued trashing of City parks comes at significant cost to its taxpayers and tourism. 

What Mobile needs is some volunteer litter police in all its parks to document the litter law violators. If the volunteer's video of some asshole littering in a park results in a conviction and $500 fine, the City should reward the volunteer $100 for each conviction. I can guarantee you if the Mobile community was aware that people of all ages and colors were secretly trying to get video of people littering, littering in public parks would become a rare thing in Mobile.

I wonder how many "litter cams" the City of Mobile has deployed in littering hot spots...