A news reporter contacted me and wanted to do an interview on my thoughts about this new litter trap. I declined. I'd rather keep taking photos of what the City is NOT doing and what reporters are NOT showing. Here is my take on the litter trap. It is a small bandaid on a single waterway in a large watershed gushing trash after rains and it will not provide much relief to downstream residents in my opinion. Plenty of trash will be washed into the same waterway just downstream from the litter trap location.
The lawyers got their money. The City of Mobile conceded and installed a litter trap in a spot guaranteed to allow litter to continue to be flushed into Dog River. ADEM is continuing to monitor Mobile's NPDES permit compliance. Despite the media fanfare for the new litter trap and ADEM's monitoring, the problem of garbage in Dog River, as you can tell from these photos, has not been resolved at all. The lazy ass workers who installed the litter trap did not even bother to remove the garbage from the creek bank where they were working but you won't see video of that on the news.
To my knowledge Mobile still has ZERO people employed to remove garbage from Mobile's polluted waterways, other than the maintenance of the one litter trap. Really? No wonder why Dog River's shoreline is full of garbage. When the oceans are completely covered in minute particles of plastic affecting the sun's reflectivity and the ocean's temperature, the consequence for future generations may be severe. At the rate we're ignoring waterway pollution, the consequences may come sooner than expected.
If you lined up just the water bottles produced in one year, they would stretch over 4,700,000 miles. To put that in perspective, the plastic water bottles would stretch from the Earth to the Moon and back about 10 times. Houston, we have a problem.
Meantime, I pessimistically expect to video document Mobile's public garbage flowing over this cheap plastic litter trap after the next heavy rain event. The solution to the local waterway pollution problem is to put someone out there full time removing the garbage from area waterways. To continue to ignore hazardous material rotting in our waterways is criminal in my opinion and a violation of the federal Clean Water Act.
Click on a photo below to view larger images with commentary.