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‘Out of Bogue Street alone, we pulled out 125’
“Out of Bogue Street alone, we pulled out 100 and I think 25,” Cal Lowing, a magnet fisherman, told WSYM.
The e-scooters are among well over 300 pulled from the river over the last year, an issue that prompted the city that’s home to Michigan State University to revoke its contract with scooter company Spin in March, and impose new regulations on similar Lime scooters.
“We use grappling hooks, magnets, winches. We do it from bridges, from the riverside, in the water, whatever it takes,” Mike Stout, president of the Michigan Waterways Stewards, told CBS News in April. “These things, when they’re entangled in metal and tangled in debris and other bicycles and other stuff down there, it’s tough. It’s really brutal work.”
Those efforts, Stout and Lowing told WSYM, are worth eliminating the serious risks that come with doing nothing.
“It’s the personal safety of someone maybe navigating, whether it be someone on the river or in the river, wading,” Stout said. “Then there’s the hazard of lithium-ion batteries being in the river. The toxicity, and any amount is not good for the environment, let alone hundreds.”
“You look at lithium, it reacts with water,” Lowing added. “It’ll actually ignite. And so once these batteries start decaying in the water, in 20 years, 30 years, what’s going to happen?”
While the city does not appear to have any organized effort to address the scooters already in the water, city officials have adopted regulations for Lime scooters that require them to be parked at least 500 feet from certain bridges.
At MSU, officials have implemented geo-fencing to disable scooters in certain locations, and the “immediate dispatch of a team member for relocation should an e-scoter end up within 300 feet of the river,” according to CBS.
“This problem that we’re having at Michigan State or East Lansing is not unique just to the area,” Stout told the news site. “It’s in every city across the country where they’re being released, and there’s a waterway. So we have this problem in Ann Arbor and Detroit and Grand Rapids and Columbus and Cleveland and Portland. So we need to see a much-improved oversight.”
It’s the same message in Chicago, where piles of e-bikes dumped into Lake Michigan are prompting environmental concerns and criticism directed at the city-owned Divvy bike share system.
Durrell Robertson, a field service operator who worked to dismantle the Oak Street Beach bike sculpture, told Block Club all of the waterlogged ebikes will go directly to the trash.
