Talk:Syringe Tide
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Just made this entry. I believe the incident warrants its own page, as it was a significant event that really brought to light a very serious problem in New Jersey. I hope on expanding on this in the near future. A book I intend to cite, "The Lost Legends of New Jersey," by Frederick Reiken, has more extensive information about the incident. Novastarj 17:26, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
My parents grew up going to the Jersey Shore as kids, so when I was born they started taking me there. Years ago, I asked my parents why we went to Maryland instead of New Jersey to go to the beach. The answer: apparently as a toddler I had picked up a syringe while walking on the beach. I just called my mom and asked her the year: 1987.
In August of 1987, 50-mile-long band of hospital waste and raw garbage suddenly appeared along the Jersey Shore. This forced the closing of all the beaches in Monmouth and Ocean County. As officials scrambled to identify its source, a more serious economic problem was happening in small businesses along the shore. It was a summer that no business owner on the Jersey shore would ever forget. All of the reports of medical waste and sewage spills drove away hundreds of thousands of vacationers, costing the $7.7-billion-a-year tourism industry on the Jersey Shore more than $1 billion in lost revenue that summer, tourism officials say. Later the losses were tallied between 15 and 40 Percent. Officials finally traced the source of the waste to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. After much deliberation, New York City was required to pay $1 million dollars for past pollution damages as well as pay for the clean up. No reparations were paid to the buisness owners on the Jersey Shore for buisness lost during the months of inactivity. Although New Jersey has always had issues with waste wash-ups, it was a source of even greater turmoil due the HIV/AIDS epidimic of the 1980’s. At the alarming rate that the HIV/AIDS virus was spreading, parents were not about to allow their children to play on the beach with the danger of steping on a potentially infected needles. Before the tourest season would ever heat up again, actions had to be made in order to ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again. In response to syringe tides of 1987 and 1988, the participants in the New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program (HEP) implemented an extremely successful effort, known as the Short-term Floatables Action Plan. The plan has been implemented since 1989 and is supposed to curtail floatable debris wash-ups by intercepting debris slicks within the Harbor. With this plan, the extent of beach closures declined from over 70 miles in 1988 to less than 4 miles in 1989, and closures have remained at a low level in recent years. The Short-term Floatables Action Plan has four key elements: • Surveillance—Environmental organizations will conduct regular air and sea patrols of the Harbor to look for and report slicks of floatable debris. • Regular Cleanups--The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will use cleanup vessels to collect floatable debris in the Harbor and focuses its activities on conditions when slicks are most likely to occur. • Non-routine Cleanups--USACE also attempts to capture additional debris slicks in the Harbor when they are detected and reported. • Communications Network-USEPA coordinates a reporting network as well as cleanup activities among all the program participants. Although this incident has been swept under the rug as the years have gone by, its legacy still remains. It is thought that is was the specific incident cited in Billy Joel's 1989 hit single We Didn't Start the Fire by the line "Hypodermics on the shores". It was also the basis for Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Great Syringe Tide.
Footnotes 1 New York, New York, New York Times, September 2, 1988
2 New York, New York, New York Times, Dec 8, 1987
3 New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program (HEP). “A Summary of the Proposed Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan”
http://library.marist.edu/diglib/EnvSci/archives/hudsmgmt/ny-njharborestuaryprogram/debris.html [24 January, 2007]
