Oh! For Mark Twain to be alive on a day like this! A boy with a slingshot could stand on one side of the ship channel separating MacArthur Causeway, by the esteemed Miami Herald building now owned by a Malaysian gambler who paid cash, and hit the pass-through cruise ships that pay no US taxes on income. It will cost a billion dollars (borrowed) to build a tunnel under that little stretch so that big trucks serving the Port of Miami will no longer mix with frustrated condo residents in downtown trying to imagine a better future free of port traffic in a "world class city".
Now comes news that the construction company that wants to build the tunnel, wants to "grout"
the lime rock under the bay before drilling, although how you do that is very much "
up-in-the-air". Miami Dade commissioners are "highly suspicious". Alarm bells are going off. Thirty years ago. A "lifetime" in real life! Thirty years ago, South Florida environmentalists -- even then an "endangered species"-- threw up a lawsuit against EPA and its plan to permit a pipeline under Biscayne Bay to carry sewage to Virginia Key. They were concerned then about wrecking the aquifer under the bay.
When the plan to build a tunnel under the Port of Miami emerged as a billion dollar public works project to "create jobs", I wondered where the lawsuit was. But I "knew" the answer. South Florida environmentalists (that would include, "me"!) were too fatigued, too stressed and stretched thin. Too "old" to raise another battle, another lawsuit. And really: does anyone care about a tunnel under the bay what with Monitor lizards in the marshes, pythons in the canals, and Big Sugar billionaires extracting value from the Everglades faster than it can be drained.
But had there been a lawsuit to "stop the tunnel!", some "questions" would have been raised. Some "eyebrows" would have been raised. Someone might have even done
a google search about what happens when you drill in a karst formation aquifer. Some common sense would have been discovered in depositions along the lines of: "You are going to do, what?!! You are going to "grout" the lime rock!?" "How much pressure does "grouted lime rock" have to take at the diameter of a multi-lane truck tunnel!?" "What happens if your "grouted" lime rock collapses under pressure?" "Have you ever "grouted" lime rock, before?"
Anyhow. It's Friday, dear "readers". Tears of hilarity threaten the structural integrity of my laptop keyboard.
Any dunderhead (including readers of this blog!) can grab a piece of lime rock in South Florida and have a good chuckle. Take a look. That lime rock is porous as a sponge. It includes lots of big openings called "fuggy voids" that once carried Everglades water like an underground Niagra Falls and nourished the bay and provided us free, cheap drinking water to supply developers and builders and their dreams of wealth.
“It just seems very odd to me that even before they start digging they need to change the project,” the county’s newly installed mayor, Carlos Gimenez, said during Thursday’s commission meeting, the first he attended as mayor. “I find it very interesting that after all these core samples, the company finds it has to do something else. I’m really not happy about this. I’m certainly going to fight this tooth and nail.”
Start chewing lime rock, Mr. Mayor and fine county commissioners. Break it into little pieces and put a little sugar on top. Stir in, spittle and a cocktail of polymers that are not permitted by law in drinking water aquifers. Ah Miami: too busy compounding zeroes to check the math. (click, read more, for the full Herald report)
