Where's the EPA when you need them?

Recently, I watched 4 EPA agents, driving 4 (count 'em: FOUR!) separate SUVs around our island, setting up air-quality testing-devices because (apparently) someone complained to them about the air-quality here on St. John.

I don't really know where to start bitching on this one...

At the SUVs?

At the fact that it took not one but FOUR (presumably well-paid) men to set up what looked like a small cymbal-stand to a drum kit?

How about the fact that from an environmental standpoint, air-quality is about the least of our worries here on St. John....

Let's start with WATER!

I looked down at Coral Bay the other day and noticed that the entire harbor looked like a toiled-bowl filled with chocolate milk. As any good St. Johnian knows, every time it rains here, there is enough runoff of silt and soil into the ocean to create serious problems for coral reefs and other ocean wildlife.



The image above (used without permission from Frank Barnako's Blog) is just one small example of the kind of runoff we're talking about here.

What gets me about this is that EVERYONE knows about it, talks about it openly, seems ACUTELY aware of it... but no one does a damn thing!

All that this island needs is few well-placed culverts, directed toward a few well-placed cache-basins and possibly a well-placed water-tower or two. Not only would this solve (or, at-least substantially mitigate) runoff problems but with the addition of a solar-powered treatment apparatus, it would supply so much fresh drinking water for the island that no resident on St. John would ever need to buy water again.

[For the uninitiated readers, drinking water is something you have to buy here on St. John. We have no public-infrastructure for things that people up in the states take for granted like running-water and sewage.]

Of course, between the millions of mis-allocated public funds, corrupt local government and all of those making a buck off of our badly-broken system, it's a wonder that we even have paved-roads here.

For the entrenched, the lack of a culvert in Coral Bay is likely to be considered a 'good' thing.

Which begs the question:

With all of the money on this tiny rock (good luck finding a house here for less the 1.2M or an apartment for less than $1500 a month), you'd think that this would have been addressed by now. If these people - who say that they care about the local wildlife and the natural beauty of St. John - who clearly have more money sense - actually DID harbor those ecological values, this problem would have been tackled back in the 1980's.

Let's show the world what a little common-sense and cooperation can do for a community instead of sitting around on our thumbs waiting for a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy to do it for us. If we act now there might be a piece of coral left for the 'turisats' to look at.

As an incentive, whoever ponies-up to the task at hand gets to be hailed publicly as an altruistic hero of the people - giving free drinking water away to each and every resident and saving our local environment in the process.

Guess that would just upset too many apple-carts.