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Dear Sir,

Is the word catastrophe too lightly used to keep getting our attention?

As a person concerned with the environment, I read with great interest the guest columnist of Rowan Hallet on March 6.

The columnist writes, "it is difficult to believe that anyone could stand on one of south shore beaches peer across the ocean stretching to horizon and see it as a yet-untapped reservoir... Are we about to undermine a vast and largely unexplored ecosystem?"

The writer also goes on to write about the ocean not withstanding toxic levels of salt and creating an Environmental Catastrophe. One of the reasons environmentalists are often ignored by the masses and it's difficult to get the message out is some of the environmentalists make outlandish statements like the desalination plant will create an environmental catastrophe.

It is the girl crying wolf.

This is a message, that while asking a bunch of straw man statements, never proposes any data to support the impact the plant will have on Bermuda.

For example, "the runoff contains twice the salt of natural seawater. Common sense and a moment of reflection should tell us that such a system cannot possibly be sustainable." This statement might be true in a very small limited simple system but to apply it to Bermuda is absurd. Consider for a moment the amount of water 250,000 - 500,000 gallons really is compared to the amount of water around Bermuda.

For simplicity's sake, let us say we had a big moat surrounding us, instead of the ocean, with a 15 mile radius of water and the average depth was 200 feet.

This is old math here, that is ?r2 or 3.14 x (15mi x 5280ft/mi)2 or 3.14 x (79,200 ft)2 or 19,696,089,600 sq. ft. I took an average of 200 feet depth of water just to be conservative, and ended up with 3,939,217,920,000 cu. ft. of water.

Now to be honest, I can never remember the conversion between cu. ft. and gallons, so there is a little Google trick. In the Google search bar you can type "3,939,217,920,000 cu. ft. in gal" and Google will produce the answer of 2.94673964 ◊ 1013 Gallons or 29.4 Trillion Gallons of Water.

Ignoring the fact that Bermuda is really in the middle of Ocean with hundreds of miles of ocean at 10's of thousands of feet of depth, and just looking at the 29.4 Trillion gallons of water within a 15 mile radius of the big moat.

If Bermuda needed to run the desalination plant at 500,000 gallons per day, it would take a mere 161,354 years to empty the moat. We have a lot of water.

Now it would also take a great deal of water processing to affect the salinity of south shore to as the author wrote "...watch our tourists bouncing about like sun burned beach balls..."

Assuming that Bermuda is roughly 30ppt (parts per thousand) in salinity and we are dumping 60ppt salinity water back into the water, we would need to dump 491,123,273,109 gallons of processed water back to raise the salinity to 31ppt.

That would take 2,689 years in our 15 mile moat at 500,000 gallons per day, if the water was stagnant. We have a lot of water.

Three things that is different from my simplified numbers and the real world.

1. Bermuda produces most of its water from roofs and doesn't need 500,000 gallons per day everyday from the desalination plant.

2. We are in the middle of the ocean a much larger body of water than the 15 square miles.

3. The ocean is moving, and there is a current passing by Bermuda all the time.

While I may seem like I am just writing a note bashing the issue, my concern is that this type of crying wolf might cause us to look away from the real issues.

Real issues

For example, the intake and outflow pipes of desalination plants while on Bermuda's size and scale are not going to cause any "environmental catastrophe", they can cause considerable harm within 100 metres or so of the pipes.

The writer should have been concerned with the location of these pipes to make sure that it was well thought out instead of the overall salinity of South Shore.

These pipes should not run near live coral or in places where there might already be toxins in the water.

Also the outflow of the pipes can cause some harm to the local plant and coral life, and it is best to flow these where there will be minimal impact.

And since the impact is relatively small in nature before it is dispersed into the mass of the ocean water, it should be relatively easy to find a proper location for these pipes.

For example, anyone who has dove the channel on North Shore knows that the coral and plant life there is already dead.

I hope the government has considered the environmental impact of where they are placing the desalination pipes to reduce the environmental impact.

I believe we should also be concerned with the amount of fossil fuels we burn and consider localized wind and solar power. Bermuda should also look at making hybrid cars duty free, to reduce our dependence on oil and gas.

It would be great to find an affordable alternative to using fossil fuels to generate electricity. I understand that BELCO is considering many alternatives.

The airport dump and the city dump have always been a great concern to me and I worry about the long term impacts of both of those facilities.

I agree with the author that lower impact alternatives should be considered before building the plant. However, I am sure that having a desalination plant will ensure we will never need to ship in water from abroad during a long summer drought.

I appreciate and applaud that the writer was concerned about our environment, and I agree we should all think about the impact that we are having in our daily lives. I hope in the future that she takes time to consider the actual impact on the environment before using the word catastrophe so lightly that all other future warnings are ignored.

Jamie Thain

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