The Flint River has been famous for being a toxic dump site for decades. Dead bodies regularly float by, mostly non-human, but a few humans get chucked into the river and die there, too. For reasons that I am not entirely clear on, the Mott Foundation donated a huge pile of cash to clean up the river and to restore it to what nature intended: something that purifies the land rather than pollutes it. (The Motts have BILLIONS of dollars: Mott was originally one of the big car engineers at the start of the early 1900s, became a corrupt mayor of Flint for several decades, and set his family up nicely. The Motts (and an offshoot of that family, the Whites) have been running this town ever since; half the buildings, streets, centers in town are named Mott or White.) So, all things usually seem to do, it started with little information and a lot of construction equipment: all the trees were torn down that line the river, particularly around UM-Flint, and walls were set up so that no one can see what is going on. The largest student parking lot at UM-Flint was taken over for the project and giant building tents appeared. Here they are:
Rumor has it that they are trawling the river bottom and pulling up whatever they get, and then plopping that sludge onto the parking lot, inside the tents. The idea is that, because the river is dead (beyond dead--it's a mummy) normal decomposition processes are not taking place. So, if all the sludge, dead bodies (animal and plant) are pulled out and set onto a big asphalt surface, and then cooked inside a tent during the peak months of summer, it will decay nicely, with bacteria breaking down the materials as God intended. We are all very excited to see what else is pulled out of the river--cars? guns? shoes? The mind boggles with anticipation. Meanwhile, the UM-Flint was told to shut down the rec center for the summer since, apparently, the smell is expected to be so foul that it would be unhealthful to be near the rot pile. I can't wait!
[Addendum: pictures of the "tents" earlier in construction taken by Simon:
Rumor has it that they are trawling the river bottom and pulling up whatever they get, and then plopping that sludge onto the parking lot, inside the tents. The idea is that, because the river is dead (beyond dead--it's a mummy) normal decomposition processes are not taking place. So, if all the sludge, dead bodies (animal and plant) are pulled out and set onto a big asphalt surface, and then cooked inside a tent during the peak months of summer, it will decay nicely, with bacteria breaking down the materials as God intended. We are all very excited to see what else is pulled out of the river--cars? guns? shoes? The mind boggles with anticipation. Meanwhile, the UM-Flint was told to shut down the rec center for the summer since, apparently, the smell is expected to be so foul that it would be unhealthful to be near the rot pile. I can't wait!
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