Hello everyone, this is my first post on this forum, my excuses if I deviate from the style of posting. I am also a new Hong Kong resident.
July 14th 2013, my girlfriend and I took a little hike and sadly witnessed the oil spill, took some pictures, oil, booms and animal samples. I wrote a little blog post about it here :
http://www.cesarharada.com/lamma-island-oil-spill-needs-more-research-cleaning/
If you haven't been to the site yourself, watch the video :
http://youtu.be/9zncIy8exLQ
I am proposing to push the research further and build a case to complete cleaning. We would use simple environmental science techniques that everyone can do with a bit of guidance :
1. Analyse water samples with simple spectrography
2. Aerial photography, using helium balloons and modified digital camera
3. Underwater photography, using simple waterproof camera.
4. Study sea life that may suffer most from oil pollutions (crabs, shells, fishes, algaes / respiratory, digestive, reproductive system). We could also interrogate local residents / anyone exposed to oil / dispersant to find out if human health is potentially at risk.
All the techniques above are low-tech, super low-cost and safe for health. Combined, they provide a very complete and compelling documentation for the 2013 Lamma Island oil spill. We can use this documentation to encourage further clean up operations, so eventually people can come back to swim, so you can eat the fish from the area without worrying of contamination.
We would perform this work over a couple of week ends, share our findings online as we work, and publish a final report / paper with observations, recommendations to clean up either mechanically, chemically or biologically (yes some microbes do eat oil).
>> So, who would like to give hand of data collection? That would be flying balloons, taking pictures underwater, assembling them on the computer, doing some maths, some physics, dissecting some animals, looking at them on the microscope, building a DIY spectrograph, researching online oil spill cleaning solutions... It would be a great community project for everyone, also really exciting for Environmental Science students.
Just to give a bit of background about me... I used to work at MIT (Boston USA) and moved to Gulf of Mexico to work on the clean up of the BP oil spill. I lived there for about 2 years studying the oil spill and developing new technologies to clean up future oil spills - in particular Autonomous Sailing robots to detect and clean up oil spills. I explain it here :
http://ted.com/talks/lang/en/cesar_harada_a_novel_idea_for_cleaning_up_oil_spills.html
I am in Honk Kong to manufacture these robots at industrial scale. I live in the New Territories.
I'm interested in your feedback, and If you want to collaboratie, please get in touch :
contact@protei.org