Florida Rain Water Run Off

Gulf Beach News

Rain Water Run Off

I’m sorry, but I’m confused.

Now some of you who think this is a "pitiful little website", are saying to yourselves, ‘Being confused is the least of this losers problems”. Well maybe you’re right, but none the less, I am confused.

You see, I was watching, my first mistake, a recent Treasure Island Commission Meeting on my favorite television channel, TITv15. Prior to watching the meeting I had taken my “medicine” just like my psychiatrist had instructed me to, locked all the knives away and turned the gas to the oven off. I was ready for anything our glorious Commission could possibly throw at me. Boy was I wrong.

I was able to keep myself properly medicated through most of the meeting and had only pounded my head against the wall twice when the Commission’s conversation turned to storm water runoff from the yards of Treasure Island homes. Apparently these yards, including mine, are so heavily laden with pollutants that Treasure Island is poised to cause an environmental disaster equal in scale to that of the Exxon Valdez spill. In order to prevent such a calamity, the Commission is talking about requiring newly constructed homes to dig retention ditches making Treasure Island look similar to the Western Front in 1918.

I’m sure those of you who think this is a "pitiful little website" are saying to yourselves, “See that right wing loser would kill baby seals in order to keep the weeds out of his yard.”. Well, yes I do want to keep the weeds out of my yard because I don’t want to be cited by the City for violating some sort of yard maintenance ordinance and I don’t want to provide the proper habitat for all sorts of varmints to take up residence in my yard. Yes I do use “weed and feed” twice a year and no I don’t think I’m killing any baby seals when I’m trying to make my yard look decent in order to keep the City off my back. And, by the way, I don’t want to turn my yard into a set for a World War I movie by digging all sorts of trenches in and around my yard in order to hold rain water run off and in the process create a nursery for millions of mosquitoes.

The real joke is that there is about 1.6 miles of sand and dirt within Treasure Island. Only a small percentage of that “land” is used for yards. That percentage is getting smaller and smaller with the current legislated trend to build lot line to lot line. In the meantime, a percentage of that 1.6 miles is paved street with an ever increasing amount of traffic. Traffic that drops oil, gas, coolant and God only knows what else onto our streets. Now, I’m no engineer, but when it rains I figure that all that oil, gas, coolant and God knows what else, is washed off the street and into drains that line our streets and into the, you guessed it, the same water the baby seal will eventually swim in.

I don’t have any hard figures, however, I’m guessing that more oil, gas, coolant and God only knows what else, is dropped onto Gulf boulevard in one day and causes more damage to the ecology when it ends up in the water than the damage I would cause by spreading a bag a day of “weed and feed” in my yard for a year.

Trying to protect the environment is a noble cause, however, patting yourself on the back for putting a band-aid on a small problem while ignoring the larger threat is pointless. If the our Commission and the Commissions of other communities truly want to tackle surface caused pollution then attack the biggest source first not the easiest. Just how many baby seals are we going to save by turning our yards into World War I battle field recreations while allowing untold gallons of petroleum based pollutants to run freely from our streets and into our bays and channels.