Other Crap

Rats! (A Tale of Government Intervention Gone Awry). How Brooklyn got overrun by possums.

Reader comment:

This reminds me of a South Texas Chemical Plant during the '80s.

They receive their water from the river through a several mile long canal. In the early '80s, the plant was having trouble getting enough water and discovered the problem was the canal was clogged with water hyacinths. The plant was in a campaign to become more environmentally responsible, so they looked for alternatives to herbicides. The alternative--nutria. Neutria eat hyacinths and the canal cleared up, with the plant no longer having water capacity problems.

Fast forward two years...the plant discovers they are buying more water from the River Authority than they are receiving at the plant. Nutria burrow....they had perforated the clay lining of the canal and water was leaking out into the surrounding fields.

Still wishing to be environmentally responsible, the plant repaired the canal and looked for something that would control the nutria. They found it....alligators. They released a few alligators in the canal (this was early enough in the alligator resurgence that they weren't yet in every puddle in coastal Texas), the nutria population was reduced to a managable level and the plant continued to operate normally.

Moving on to the late '80s. A midnight shift operator was approaching the control panel for the lift pumps that took water from the canal and circulated it into the plant. A large (the operator described it as 12', but he might have been a little excited) alligator was lying near the pump controls preventing anyone from getting near them. Now they had a plant safety problem on top of the canal problems.

The plant trapped the alligators out of the canal, killed the remaining nutria and has used herbicides ever since to keep water hyacinths from growing in the canal. The plant's exploits were legendary within the company at the time, but there are very few of us old timers left from that time to remember it now.