Coral Growing Project

From my journal: February 2, 2010

I have more information about those awful ripelles that I wrote about back in November.  They weren’t actually doing their work in Arno.  Unfortunately, they were doing their project right here in Ine and all staying in Jabo.  So I got to see what they were up to.

In theory, it is a good legitimate project.  They build the metal cages, place them in the lagoon, and zap them with electricity to encourage coral to grow.  The extra coral slows the force of the waves and therefore lessens beach erosion which is a huge problem here.  Many atolls have lost their sandy beaches due to wave erosion.  And the metal structures provide habitat for fish.

However, the whole project has lost credibility in my eyes because after the head scientist left, the project was turned over to the crazy, rude guy that lives in Jabo.  He’s a big schemer and I don’t trust his intentions one bit.  And what makes matters worse is that they brought in a big fancy expensive windmill financed by the German government to generate the electricity, but less than a day after it was turned on, it fell over and was destroyed.  I couldn’t believe it!  All that money and time wasted, and now the broken windmill is just lying on the lagoon dock, going nowhere.  I’m sure it will be impossible to remove and will just sit and rust like all the other large machinery that comes and dies in this country.  Maybe they’ll push it into the lagoon to get it off the dock.

Now, because there is no windmill to power the biorock, as it’s called, they could not put all the metal cages out in the lagoon.  So they are just sitting above the beach waiting for some kid to think it’s a jungle gym and get a nasty, rusty cut.  The Jabo guy says he’s going to try to get a couple of solar panels and a battery so at least the cages already in the lagoon can get power.  But the windmill was supposed to produce so much power, that solar panels just can’t compare.  It’s such a shame that whoever installed the windmill was so incompetent because it could have actually made this project worthwhile.