|
|
From: (no name) (no email)
Date: Sun Feb 17 2002 - 14:03:33 EST
In a message dated 2/14/02 10:01:25 AM Eastern Standard Time,
writes:
> The bottom line here is: Do you want clean water or not?
The only clean water is water with nothing else in it. I suppose one could
make it by burning pure hydrogen with pure oxygen in a lab.
All water capable of floating a boat has varying degrees of contamination.
"Clean" water is a false term, all water is impure, its just a matter of
what's in it and how much. Seawater is really a thin soup of biomatter, some
alive and some in an in-between state. What we add from our boats is not
different in any essential way from what would be in water if humans did not
exist. Even petroleum oozes from the earth in places.
So it is all a matter of degree, and our boats add a very small degree
compared to other human activities in areas where there is good water
circulation.
From my experience the only places that show an obvious problem are places
where boats are in pockets of little water movement. A good example is
Baltimore harbor, a pocket of the dirtiest water I have ever been in, which
is filled with visible litter from the land despite the activities of skimmer
boats cruising about. One can only wonder about the invisible trash in the
water. Yet even here, the vast majority of the contamination is from the
land. Just after we left a couple of years ago they had some error that let
millions of gallons of raw sewerage to flow into the harbor. The newspaper
quoted officials as saying that nature would take care of it, and indeed,
eventually nature did take care of it.
The opposite is Key West where the water is constantly changing and is clean
looking despite the daily dumpings (brown and smelly) from the local sewer
"treatment" plant.
Seems to me that if boaters are banned from draining anything into the water,
the land should be banned from draining anything into the water too or there
will be no noticeable effect because the vast majority of human based
contamination is run-off from the land. This, of course, would mean that all
areas of human habitation (world wide) would have to be sealed off and all
water, including rain water which is the major carrier of human
contamination, leaving the area would have to be cleaned of all contaminants,
clearly a ludicrous goal. But unless this is done, stopping the draining of
grey water from boats will have no significant effect on the level of
impurities in the water.
Norm
___________________________________________________________________________
|| The Live-Aboard List : send a "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" request ||
|| in body of message to: ||
|