After more than $1 million spent on what the locals call “the bubbler” — more than 45-miles of aeration tubing installed at the bottom of their once-clear lake — Vermont’s Lake Carmi is right back where it started, plagued with toxic cyanobacteria outbreaks.
Currently, six of the seven test sites at the lake are under a safety alert, three considered “high alerts,” and the State of Vermont has $1 million less to spend on real solutions to the problem.
We hate to say “we told you so,” but so did the corporation who designed the system. Everblue Lake Systems made it clear that its aeration system, the largest one it has ever installed, would not work if – at the same time – the phosphorus overloading from the regions CAFO dairy farms wasn’t also curtailed.
But Vermont regulators and politicians went all-in on “the bubbler,” a Hail Mary that, in the end, will prove to be little more than a distraction and delay from the real solution: A transition away from the CAFO dairies that are responsible for 85% of the pollution.
The time for gimmicks is over. The great people of the Lake Carmi region deserve to have their lake back, and their health, safety, and economy – all ravaged by the cheap-milk model that is serving no one except dairy corporations like Ben & Jerry’s that, shamelessly, are profiting from the mess.
