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
Would not put even my big toe in any of that water..... Mobile is turning into a huge disappointment.
ReplyDeleteDitto what Nannie said.
ReplyDeleteWe should just start a canoe/kayak trash pick up event. A parade of paddlers go down the river picking up trash along the river. Many hands make the work light. Since the city doesn't care, gather up some volunteers.
ReplyDeletePaddlers did not put the trash in the waterway, the City's drainage system did. Let the City be responsible for removing the trash their system put in the waterway.
DeleteVolunteer cleanups using kayakers have proven over the years to be about as effective at cleaning up a trashy waterway as it would be giving a child a toothbrush and small squirt gun to clean a cattle hauling trailer that has never been cleaned in 20 years, and expecting the kid to do the job in 4 hours. In either case, not much shit is ever removed.