Butte Hill Oobleck

 Oobleck - does best describe the piles of "uncontained" melting snow piles around Butte.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) in his book "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" describes a disgusting mess of an additional seasonal precipitation - requested by the King for a change of visual scenery - I believe we have achieved some quality Butte Oobleck!

So in several recent Ga Ga Blogs I have called for better snow removal. If you are going to pick up and dispose of snow it has to go somewhere, correct? Some cities have massive machines that melt the snow as it is dumped in, not practical nor cost effective here in the Mountain West. So we pick it up and dump, but not at the top of Mount Crumpit (another Seuss book).

The problem, as I see it, is that these dump locations are not specifically designated nor designed for this purpose. Have you seen these piles of Snow? The melting piles are black, full of gravel, sand, trash, dog excrement, oil, road chemicals, heavy metals mine-waste and various dead things - Oobleck indeed.

 If our community is so worried about environmental issues, issues that include storm-water-run-off, these piles of Oobleck are just that: storm-water runoff when they melt, plus an assortment of "Shuffle Duffle Muzzle Muff" to quote Seuss.

The hero of the book is Bartholomew Cubbins, a young boy who makes the King say "Sorry" for not fully thinking out the consequences of his Oobleck decision. So let's get going on some good old planning efforts, take out the map, see what BSB owns, draw in some radiuses and designate specific areas.

Our environmental efforts talk about how wonderful our Superfund settling ponds are. Well we need some constructed depressed areas for our frozen snow to melt off, that contains the Oobleckian debris to be separated, cleaned-out and the melted H2O to be filtered prior to being released into our creek and shared with everyone else in the Columbia River Basin.  

I have always loved the wisdom of Seuss as he is able to put complicated issues into words and pictures, concepts that a child and even an adult can understand.