# The Rubbish Chute.



## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

With all the talk in the press and on television about floating plastic waste polluting the oceans of the world, it brought back to me a very interesting story that I'd observed... set in the Caribbean Sea. In the autumn of 1979... after the cyclone season of that year... my ship, Debut, was anchored in the outer anchorage of St. Bathelemy, in the Leeward Islands. There were two offshore islands to the south of us named Les Islets, giving some sense of protection from the prevailing south-easterly trade winds and westerly-setting ocean currents.
We were far enough offshore from Port-de-Gustavia to avoid the heat, mosquitoes and noisy power station of the small town. The waterfront was a hive of activity, and St. Bathelemy turned out to be one of the nicest islands in the Caribbean... if not the world. There were small pavement cafés and restaurants overlooking the harbour, dotted between trendy fashion boutiques, with a backdrop of volcanic mountains rising behind the town.
We started off on our run ashore that day with drinks in the Bar Select... a bar very patriotic to the island's original Swedish ancestry. Outside, protruding on either side of the outer doorway on flagstaffs, hung the Swedish and French national flags. On the inside of the outer wall, hung official photographs of the King and Queen of Sweden. Between them was a photograph of the King of Sweden shaking hands with the man serving drinks behind the bar.
After a pleasant lunch at one of the small restaurants around the inner harbour of medium-rare steaks, followed by Camembert cheese and coffee... with a couple of bottles of good French white wine to wash it down... I took my girlfriend, Peggy, up the road leading to a cleft in the ridge that ran along the coast, and projected northwards into the sea, forming the harbour. The road ended at a concrete lip. A chute was carved from the living rock, angling downwards for fifty feet, then plunging with a vertical drop for another hundred feet straight into the turbulent sea below.
Peggy held my hand while staring down at the waves below. "What on earth is this for?" she asked me.
"It's the garbage chute," I told her. "The trucks back up to the lip and tip their loads straight down into the sea. It either sinks, drifts away to become someone else's problem, or is eaten by the hundreds of sharks that live here just to feed off it."
"You're kidding!" she gasped out loud. "But that's disgusting!"
I picked up a rock and threw it into the surging swell. At once, the area boiled with grey fins, darting about in a frenzy.
"Oh, Dick, we were swimming off the ship only the other day! I'm not going in there again."
"There's no place on this small mountainous island for a garbage dump, and the French are never too concerned with the environment, anyway. It solves the problem! But I'd have thought even they could have built it away from the hospital." I pointed to the nearby building, and then at the millions of flies buzzing around the waste-matter stuck to the rocky chute.
Peggy pulled a face and covered her mouth with her hand. "Let's get away from here!" she protested. "It's spoilt my lunch."
"It's the first time I've seen it myself," I explained to her. "Andy told me about it. It's a playground for the local boys... they lose one occasionally." She dug me in the ribs for me to stop. All the best, Cpt Dick Brooks.


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## ART6 (Sep 14, 2010)

Cpt Dick Brooks said:


> With all the talk in the press and on television about floating plastic waste polluting the oceans of the world, it brought back to me a very interesting story that I'd observed... set in the Caribbean Sea. In the autumn of 1979... after the cyclone season of that year... my ship, Debut, was anchored in the outer anchorage of St. Bathelemy, in the Leeward Islands. There were two offshore islands to the south of us named Les Islets, giving some sense of protection from the prevailing south-easterly trade winds and westerly-setting ocean currents.
> We were far enough offshore from Port-de-Gustavia to avoid the heat, mosquitoes and noisy power station of the small town. The waterfront was a hive of activity, and St. Bathelemy turned out to be one of the nicest islands in the Caribbean... if not the world. There were small pavement cafés and restaurants overlooking the harbour, dotted between trendy fashion boutiques, with a backdrop of volcanic mountains rising behind the town.
> We started off on our run ashore that day with drinks in the Bar Select... a bar very patriotic to the island's original Swedish ancestry. Outside, protruding on either side of the outer doorway on flagstaffs, hung the Swedish and French national flags. On the inside of the outer wall, hung official photographs of the King and Queen of Sweden. Between them was a photograph of the King of Sweden shaking hands with the man serving drinks behind the bar.
> After a pleasant lunch at one of the small restaurants around the inner harbour of medium-rare steaks, followed by Camembert cheese and coffee... with a couple of bottles of good French white wine to wash it down... I took my girlfriend, Peggy, up the road leading to a cleft in the ridge that ran along the coast, and projected northwards into the sea, forming the harbour. The road ended at a concrete lip. A chute was carved from the living rock, angling downwards for fifty feet, then plunging with a vertical drop for another hundred feet straight into the turbulent sea below.
> ...


I recall my first visit to Jakarta to see this. These are people who spend their lives in the river collecting plastics that they can sell for recycling. But all rivers lead to the sea, so what percentage do they not collect? 

It seems to have become customary to blame ships at sea for the pollution, but what about those on land?


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## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

*For ART 6.*

G'day, ART 6, it's good to hear from you, and thank you for your input. When you think of it, it's unbelievable that things like this can happen in this modern world... although I think these practices have by now long since ceased to happen. There was a similar incident happened in Dutch St. Martin when the rubbish dump was flooded with the arrival of Hurricane Frederick, in 1979, totally washing years of landfill out into the Caribbean Sea. My account of this incident can be found in my book, 'The Black Ship's Odessa : Book One.' You can go to the Books Forum to download the Kindle code for this publication. Enjoy the read. All the best, Cpt Dick Brooks .


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## LYDavis (Aug 26, 2016)

*Middle of Montreal*

In 1960 and 1962 I was Mate of the s.s. Cape Breton running back and forth carrying coal from Sydney Cape Breton Island to Montreal. We discharged at a berth in Montreal right into the docks as far as a ship could go. Ahead of us was a lock gate and every afternoon about 6pm it was opened and a disgusting mess of blood and guts - presumable from the nearby slaughterhouses - came pouring into the dock! If we were early finishing discharging and leaving around then the last mooring ropes to let go were covered in it as we hauled them in as fast as possible!


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## A.D.FROST (Sep 1, 2008)

The only way to stop dumping plastic is to stop making it or dink out of a glass(Pint) remember this


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## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

*To LY Davies and A.D.Frost.*

G'day, guys, it's good to hear from you. I must first apologize for my late reply to you, but I had two of my grandchildren visiting, along with their pet French bulldog, that left me a little present on my bedroom carpet... or seven or eight of them in a little pile. It's surprising how much plastic rubbish there is on some of the Pacific's beautiful un-inhabited desert islands, although I scavenged anything of use that I could.
During salvage operations, I needed every plastic bottle that I could lay my hands on... to mark coral bommies and the locations of my positioning anchors and the ends of cables to be picked up. 
I've also used them while on anchor during hurricanes in the northern latitudes and cyclones in the southern. With visibility down to less than twenty feet, and being in a radar total white-out, they were a good indication if my ship was dragging anchor. As hurricanes passed over us, we would drop buoys as we swung round in a circle because of the circling change in direction of the wind.
Many times my crew would ask, 'what do you want that for?', when I collected a boatload of flotsam from a beach, but I would give them a knowing wink and tell them that they never knew.
Back in the sixties, there was a yeast factory just to the west of Stoke Bridge, and when they emptied their tanks, the River Orwell was covered in large blobs of floating yeast. Add to this the red goo from Burton's jam factory at St. Peter's Dock when they flushed out their vats, the river was one vast sarsaparilla! 
If you happen to fall into the Ipswich Wet Dock in those day, you had to be rushed straight to Anglsea Road Hospital for a whole raft of injections. At least there wasn't much plastic flotsam in those days. All the best to you both, Cpt Dick Brooks.


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