Baltimore’s much-admired water wheel, which traps trash in the Inner Harbor, captured 19 tons (TONS!!!) of trash and debris this Monday. That’s enough garbage to fill 6.5 dumpsters– the most it’s ever captured in one day.
The wheel is powered by the Jones Falls’s current, as well as by a few solar panels. That means when storms bring more trash to the Inner Harbor, the water wheel kicks into even higher gear. The water wheel’s record-setting day came after the first major spring storm of the season.
And this is probably…. just in time for Earth Day!
This city needs serious punishment for littering.
Seriously! Something’s wrong when the story is about how good “the waterwheel” is instead of how effed up the littering in this city is.
We get all of the trash from the surrounding counties storm sewers. When your sanitary sewer lines can’t handle the volume and overflow, we get that.
The water wheel is new tech and it will continue to get even better.
To be fair, the figure is for litter AND debris — as you can see from the photo, there’s a lot of twigs/leaves/general organic matter that gets washed into the harbor during a storm, too. But I agree: Litter is awful.