Mobile Waterway Blues

This is what kayaking in Mobile's Trashy urban waterways is like. Sadly, this is after 5 years of filing complaints about the City's waterway trash pollution problem to the City of Mobile and to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

Insanely, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) sets no limit on the amount of litter and industrial trash that a community puts into its public waterways.

You heard right. In Alabama if the surface of a public waterway is completely covered with trash (some of the trash toxic), ADEM does NOT consider the waterway to be polluted. That is retarded.

Even though technology, growing at a leaps and bounds pace, is making life easier, the level of human intelligence continues to spiral downward just as fast.

Coating Earth With Plastic

Coating the public waterways and shorelines in Mobile with Plastic.

Maple Street Canal

After almost 5 years of filing complaints to Environmental Enforcement Agencies about the trash pollution in Maple Street Canal, how is the Canal looking today? The only change is the trash pollution is denser. That is unacceptable.

Americans, at least most of the ones in Alabama, obviously do not give a damn about the integrity of their marine environments. Alabama leaders should be arrested for ignoring waterway pollution complaints and sent to Jail beginning with ADEM's Water Division Chief Glenda Dean and Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson.

Rabbit Creek

Eastern Sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus) was in bloom near the shoreline.

On a smaller scale Dwarf Sundew (Drosera brevifolia) was about to bloom. This wetland plant supplements its need for nutrition by capturing and digesting insects. The yellow circle highlights one insect being eaten by the Sundew after it got stuck on the sticky droplets.

Fishing spiders are frequently seen on trees next to the water. Yes, these spiders capture and eat minnows.

What scares some people is just how big fishing spiders can get. This spider that was about 8 inches from leg tip to leg tip.

The fishing spiders do not bother me. What does is the storm water trash.

Motorized litter removal boats cannot reach this trash. This floating trash in Rabbit Creek can only be accessed by canoe or kayak. Unfortunately I know of no effective program in Mobile that regularly removes trash accumulations from upper creeks and tributaries. The City of Mobile, Mobile County, the State of Alabama, and all the environmental groups just ignore the waterway pollution even though some of it may be hazardous to public health and marine life.

Bayou Chateauguay

You can change the name of a polluted creek but you cannot change its image without changing its image.

A bicycle group wants to change the name of polluted Three Mile Creek to Bayou Chateauguay which no one will ever be able to pronounce. The bicycle group also wants a 10-12 mile bicycle trail built along the creek.

I say, do not waste a dime of money on the polluted Three Mile Creek until the City of Mobile respects and values their waterway asset enough to remove the trash from its trashy shorelines.

Here is what the shoreline typically looks like along the last few miles of Three Mile Trash Creek. This photo merge was taken yesterday.

Three Mile Creek Paddle

It's been over 4 years since I starting complaining to authorities about the trash in One Mile Creek in the Three Mile Creek Watershed demanding that the trash be removed. So how well are City, State, Environmental, and Media leaders doing to get the trash removed? Photos tell the ugly truth. Authorities have done absolutely nothing to clean up the pollution.

For every piece of trash floating in the water, there is 10 to 100 times more filling up the wetlands.

What is worse is some trash is hazardous to the environment, marine life and public health. Here is mosquito breeding ground in an old cooler. 

Who knows . . . maybe the next generation of humans will all have little heads and smaller brains thanks to the spreading Zika Virus compliments of the retarded leaders of this generation who will waste about $35 Million dollars to build a museum, and spend millions to build soccer fields, but will not spend a dime to remove the waterway trash pollution that their community of litter chunkers were responsible for putting there.

Is This Polluted Shoreline Acceptable?

February 2012

February 2013

March 2014

October 2015

January 28, 2016

This is the trashy shoreline of Dog River in Mobile Alabama, USA. All the photos are taken in nearly the same place about 100 yards from Dog River Park.

The City of Mobile's Municipal Storm Water System serves as a conduit to propel the litter chunking community's trash into the State's public waterway called as Dog River.

Despite years of complaints about City's MS4 trash being sent to the shorelines of Dog River you can see the result of the City and State's response to my complaints. The shoreline trash, which occasionally is floating in the water is getting denser Year after Year and no one gives a fuck.

What is floating in the public waterways in the City of Mobile's jurisdiction? No one really knows because the Environmental Enforcement Agencies are incompetent and do not care to address pollution complaints.

Is it acceptable for a City to fill wetlands with trash some of which is hazardous to public health and marine life? 

Here are a couple more photos of the wetlands of Dog River.

January 28, 2016

January 28, 2016

And all this trash is about 100 yards from Dog River's Spring Clean Up and Fall Coastal Clean Up Zone. That is why I say volunteer clean ups are worthless in cleaning up a polluted waterway like Dog River.

Stormwater Systems Bandalong Litter Trap

Shoreline upstream of the Stormwater Systems Bandalong litter trap remains polluted with trash.

Trashy shoreline downstream of the litter trap.

Trashy shoreline downstream of the litter trap.

Trashy shoreline downstream of the litter trap.

Any community considering the purchase of a hugely expensive Stormwater System's Bandalong Litter Trap should NOT waste money on it. At least not if the waterway is in the tidal zone.

Despite a $660,000 Bandalong litter trap installation in Eslava Creek, the creek remains polluted with trash both upstream and downstream.

Expecting a single litter trap to result in a cleaner watershed with many tributaries is like putting a large dust pan in one place along a Mardi Gras parade route and expecting it to corral the parade trash for easy removal. Sure, a large dust pan will catch a few pieces Mardi Gras trash but the remainder of the parade route will remain trashy unless laborers pick up the rest of the trash not caught in the dust pan.

The reality from the perspective of my kayak is, if a community wants clean waterways it will take manual labor working on the water from an appropriate boat and on the shorelines on foot to remove the litter chunking community's storm water trash from where it ends up in each navigable waterway after rains. 

To me it seems the Stormwater Systems Bandalong Litter Trap is a burden to the City of Mobile because to remove a few pounds (bags) of lightweight plastic bottles and styrofoam trash after a heavy rain seems to require removing tons of leaves, pine straw, twigs, and grass too. Then those tons of wet natural debris have to be hauled away.

Mobile's $660,000 would have yielded better results by employing a Clean Up Boat trash picker upper person for 15 years. 

Look no further than the Charles River in Boston to see a Clean Up Boat operation that has been successfully keeping the Charles River clean for over a decade at almost no cost to the City if Boston.

Local environmental groups and the City of Mobile were told about the successful Charles River Clean Up Boat operation over 5 years ago and all turned down a opportunity to mimic the waterway cleanup in Mobile's trashy waterways. 

Nooo, some environmental group leader was bent on getting a litter trap instead of helping to get a Clean Up Boat in operation. She got her wish and Eslava Creek and Dog River are still lined with a sickening amount of trash because apparently the City and Community as a whole still employ ZERO full time trash picker uppers to clean the community's trash polluted waterways. That is retarded.

Trashy shoreline of Dog River downstream of the Bandalong Litter Trap.

Contrary to the popular notion that all storm water trash is benign, storm water trash includes trash hazardous to the environment and public health, like electronics and chemicals.

Not only have environmental agencies, groups and the Government failed Flint Michigan, they are failing to care about Alabama waterways too. That is pathetic.

Got Cancer Yet?

Dog River Park Blight

May 2009 - Kayak launch at Dog River Park - functional.

April 2011 - City of Mobile officials and Dog River Clearwater Revival officials designate the Dog River Park kayak launch as an official launch site of the newly dedicated Dog River Scenic Blueway. Launch site still functional.

January 2016 - The City of Mobile and Dog River Scenic Blueway group quit maintaining the Dog River Park Kayak Launch despite complaints. The newly dedicated Dog River Scenic Blueway kayak launch site is no longer functional because of blight.

And if you look closer at the Blighted Dog River Park Kayak Launch area you will see it is almost always polluted with trash because the City of Mobile still appears to have no plan to regularly remove trash from their park shorelines. No one cares if Dog River Park stays polluted with trash.

Shame on the City of Mobile Parks Department, Dog River Scenic Blueway Committee, Dog River Clearwater Revival, and ADEM. Shame on Mayor Stimpson who stood on the trashy shoreline of Dog River Park making a video about littering yet he cannot implement a simple plan to remove trash from the park shoreline every time the park is mowed.

A City that refuses to regularly pick up trash from their park property and refuses to mow around the Kayak Launch they helped officially dedicate is a City that does not care about its waterway environment.

And it is not just the Kayak Launch area of Dog River Park that is blighted. Easy to see Trash is ignored even in plain view of the park signage.

Dog River is one big Trash Chute to Mobile City Leaders and the community of Litter Chunkers. ADEM is obviously still ignoring the City of Mobile's continuing violations of State and Federal pollution laws.

Sunset on Dog River

The City of Mobile uses Dog River as a Garbage Chute in violation of the Federal Clean Water Act leaving many waterfront homeowners burdened to remove the City's storm water trash after every heavy rain. Ugly sunsets for some as seen in the above photo taken today.

But, if you get away from the shoreline of Dog River sunsets can be more enjoyable.

Misleading Litter Trap Statistics?

I recently read in a news story that Mobile's new Bandalong Litter Trap in Eslava Creek has removed 42 cubic yards of debris since it was installed. Each cubic yard represents about 5 large barrels of volume. So 42 cubic yards is about 202 barrels of material removed.

It is just as I expected. The City of Mobile is already spouting off Litter Trap removal statistics to the media. I suppose you gotta justify a $660,000 expenditure somehow. Then the litter trap manufacturer can in turn repeat those big removal statistics to prove the effectiveness of their litter trap product.

But let us look closer at the litter trap removal statistics. The first red flag is the news story says it was 42 cubic yards of "debris" removed, not trash which is all that should be removed from the waterway.

One look at the contents in a litter trap basket while it gets emptied shows the majority of material in the litter trap basket is often natural debris such as leaves and twigs and grass.

In other words, unless the City or some other volunteer group separates the actual trash from the natural debris, we will never have a clear idea on just how much trash is actually removed from Eslava Creek. We will just have misleading removal statistics that include the volume of leaves and other natural debris removed too.

The way I will judge the effectiveness of any litter trap is whether there is trash floating around in the water. The volume of leaves and grass the litter trap captures is meaningless to me unless you want to assign that task to the wasted taxpayer costs involved in removing the natural debris and hauling off that heavy wet load to the dump.

I’d rather read statistics on how many plastic bottles, aluminum cans etc., are removed from Eslava Creek and recycled.

If you were to remove just the trash seen in the litter trap in this view it probably would not fill a barrel half way. In other words, the City of Mobile workers waste time and money removing a lot of leaves and twigs to remove a little floating stormwater trash.

Look at the contents of the old DESMI litter trap being removed. It is almost all leaves, grass and twigs.

Look at the basket content of the new Bandalong litter trap being removed. It too is almost all leaves, grass and twigs. I am not impressed when hearing about how many cubic yards of 'debris' is removed. I would rather know many actual barrels of trash were removed and how much of it was recycled.

When I have to paddle by storm water trash like this 100 yards away from the litter trap, the trashy polluted scenery of Dog River and Eslava Creek has not changed at least to this paddler. 

I just wonder how much taxpayer money was wasted coralling leaves and twigs, emptying the heavy ass soaked natural debris into a truck and hauling it to the dump or trash transfer station. Money that might have been spent on labor to remove the storm water trash floating in the water next to the litter trap and elsewhere in the creek.

Dog River Litter Woes Continue

So, how did the City of Mobile's new $660,000 litter trap do in keeping Dog River clean? I took a paddle up Dog River today to investigate and report.

Apparently the rain did not come down hard enough and long enough to propel all the City of Mobile's Eslava Creek storm water litter all the way to the Stormwater System's litter trap. The photo above shows trash a few hundred feet above the litter trap whose boom can be seen in the background. For this kayaker the trash polluted Eslava Creek scenery is still ugly as hell!

Polluted shoreline of Dog River Park downstream of the litter trap.

There is so much broken up styrofoam along the shoreline of Dog River Park it looks like snow.

The wetlands in front of the River Landing Condos are rather trashy. The Condos are downstream of the litter trap.

Another view of the River Landing Condo's property. This Condo shoreline trash pollution is not the result of the litter trap failing to work. Nope. As water levels rose high enough to free up the nearby trash in the wetlands (already downstream of the litter trap), which gets ignored year after year, the strong winds out of the southeast blew the loose floatable trash onto the Condo property.

So, to me the installation of a big new litter trap has NOT resolved the City of Mobile's storm water pollution problem in Dog River. Just look at what River Landing Condo owners still get to see after a windy rainstorm.

Yup, when the water levels go high and the wind blows it leaves a distinctive trash ring around some Dog River shorelines. Owning waterfront property along Dog River's trash zone can be a significant burden when it rains heavy or storms.

Lovely huh?

Nope, I still see no improvement in the trash polluted Dog River and Eslava Creek despite a Litter Trap. This photo taken just downstream of Dog River Park.

The problem has to be addressed before there can be improvement. What is the problem? No one is employed to remove the City of Mobile's MS4 trash from where pollutes the shorelines. I saw no one working to remove any of the trash except for a few residents.

It is amazing how quick the powers that be get the storm trash and debris removed from an affected road but when it comed to removing storm trash from an affected waterway the pollution is ignored.

Welcome to Mobile where the City leaders are taking the lead role in seeing how much litter the community can put in the Alabama public waterways in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

Storm Water Trash Polluted Sanitary Sewer Right-of-Way. Who will clean it up? This trash has been ignored for YEARS.

Storm Water Trash Polluted Railroad Right-of-Way. Who will clean it up? This trash has been ignored for YEARS.

Storm Water Trash Polluted ALDOT Right-of-Way. Who will clean it up? This trash has been ignored for YEARS.

Dog River Wetland. Is this acceptable? What do you think?

Nope, the Dog River Watershed scenery does not seem to be changing.