Government officials and all kinds of agencies experts from every county and state on the west coast are going on about the need to get ready for the tsunami debris.  You would have thought waiting until 3 months before the change of the millennium to do contingency planning would have been a lesson that stuck on not procrastinating. But here it is, more than a year ago that the steady march of debris began heading for our shores and now the chickens are running around, yet again.  Not only are that flapping their gums and wings and looking silly, but they are making everything so hard.

Unemployment in California is 10.8%, Oregon 8.4%, Washington 8.3% and Alaska 7.0%.  Take a small percentage of one of the grants out of DC that was going to fund some special interest political pork barrel project and divert the funds to the Ocean Debris Recovery Coalition (ODRC) staffed by newly hired qualified personnel. Develop simple mitigation strategies designed to locate and recover the larger debris offshore, hire out of work boats and crews to bring material into ports for waiting barges to be loaded by out of work longshoremen.  These same barges will be the delivery point of debris which comes ashore and is collected by beach collection teams made up on volunteers and of newly hired team leaders. Hire out of work truck drivers to haul the dumpsters of material collected from the beach, onto the same barges in port where they will make their way to appropriate landfills.  Each member of the ODRC will be trained and provided with protocols for standard items and unusual finds.  Hire out of work contractors to refurbish  abandoned buildings in each coastal county to be used as the ODCR museum and office( yes, hire unemployed to work here too) where a tsunami display will be created out of items collected over the next few years. This building will serve as the focal point for grassroots education on not just the effects of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, but also provide education materials for the threat facing residents and visitors to the west coast from our own Cascadia fault line.

Either this debris will be handled simply at the local level, or expect the wing flapping government officials and agency experts will be squawking to see their budgets increased so they can build a rocket ship to handle the problem.