St. Maarten Private Eye

Dear Flipper,

On December 7th, a concerned citizen of St.Maarten took pictures of the severe polluted state of theSimpson Bay lagoon.
The pollution was located in the waters to the back of the FEDEX building, bakery and Simpson Bay Yacht club.
The Sint Maarten PRIDE foundation went on location last Friday for a view and took samples of the polluted water.
Indeed the water was very dark brown, was impossible to see through the water and the pollution seemed to be coming from the Water Front road area.
This time the pollution could be Red Tide, a high concentration of sewage originating from land.
Samples taken by the PRIDE foundation were taken to the American Medical school in Cupecoy.
Proffessor Kathi Shupe, Proffessor of microbiologie and immunology will try to determine the bacteria.
Results will be known after the holidays.
I thank Proffessor Shupe for her assistance with this project as well as Sue Atchley for her constant support for PRIDE and her serious determination to get AUC started with recycling.
This is something we still have to get off the ground.
However the people of St.Maarten really have to start using their heads and not become zombies as Daniella Jeffrey stated at her book launching last Thursday.
wich she calls the zombification of a people.
While she attributes this behaviour to the people's not wanting to deal with constitutional issues and prefers that others do it for them.
I will say that they same behaviour exsists for the environmnetal issues, our people walk around as zombies thinking that some one else should deal with this issue and the issue will clear itself up naturally.
Let us look at Water Front road, remember that this road was always wet and slimey green in many corners? the road has now been resurfaced, it is for the most part dry.
where did the smelly water go to? did it magically dissappear?
Our Lagoon has become a cespitt, the buildings bordering the lagoon all have their pipes sticking out to the lagoon.
Their is no soak away here, all waste water grey and black including washing machine water goes into the lagoon.
I will not even bother naming names, as every building and building complex has built this way.
The problem also exsists over at the apartments on the Cole Bay corner, where the sewage water was ending up on water front road, the Cole Bay corner has a ditch with nasty green water always full. this is sewage coming from apartment buildings in Cole Bay.this water has to run somewhere right?
We as a people will have to come up with ideas on how we will put a halt to this problem, we as a people will have to realise that we will have to make certain changes in the way we build and we will have to introduce a more modern approach.
We will also have to realise that not every new idea should be shot down before it gets a chance to bring us into the 21st. century.
I will leave it up to the people to think for themselves on what they think should be the solution.
1. should we think about smaller sewage plants for each area? Cole Bay Simpson Bay could use one.
2. Do filters exsit to filter black and grey waters from buildings located directly on the lagoon?
3.should we introduce very strong building codes which deals with sewage and grey water run off? There is a phase 2 of a an exsisting building complex currently being built on the Simpson Bay lagoon, shouldn't our building inspectors make sure that this 2nd phase does not have water pipes leading to the lagoon?
4. what about legislation and enforcement, we need marine inspectors to check the lagoon for environmental offenses on a constant basis.
The Marine Park ordinance DOES NOT cover the Simpson Bay lagoon.
5. with #4 we need money and educated man power in this field.
6.With #4 we also need to start talking how we will deal with environmental legislation as most of our environmental laws are Federal laws. will we just copy and paste them? or will we review and see what we can update to deal with the island development for the next 50 years
For this we will also need money as we will need legal policy makers to go over these legislation books.

I have to agree with Daniella Jeffrey that our people are zombies, no one is thinking, many are talking from their asses behinds.
And our politicians are busy with quick fix band-aid cover ups, not dealing with the cancer that could become fatal.

I will leave it up to other people now to think and to come up with viable solutions as to how we St.Maarterners should deal with our environmental problems, the once beautiful Simpson Bay lagoon, the Great Salt Pond, frequent oil spills in our surrounding waters.We are beginning to see these problems now all too frequently as the island is going through a rapid economic boom.
What our politicians refuse to see with this economic boom is that the more we build, the more people our island accomodates, the more problems we will have to deal with and try to solve.