|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
FAIRHAVEN — Standing on a shaky dock at Union Wharf, Brandon Estrella tosses a ball into the near-black water. Then a plastic water bottle. Then a soup can. Then another can.
As the trash bobs farther out into the harbor, Estrella, the assistant to the harbormaster, grabs a remote. Soon, a school-bus-yellow machine roughly the size of a lawnmower dutifully swims towards the debris.
Like a slow, plodding golden retriever, the robot approaches a can and Estrella guides it into the net, then does the same with the other can, water bottle, and finally the ball.
Effective? Yes. Fast? Not really. Cute? Absolutely.
The first of its kind on the East Coast, the machine, called a Jellyfishbot, is designed to help the Town of Fairhaven curb litter in the water, control oil spills, and monitor vessels for leakage, among other issues all too common to the commercial harbor. But its practicality is only part of its appeal.
Affectionately dubbed Bumblebee, the chirpy yellow “water Roomba” is the product of the latest round of Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) grants from the state.
Unlike most state grants, Fairhaven Town Planner Bruce Webb said this latest round of funding required the town to engage communities typically left out of the municipal decision-making process.
So the town held a series of community events to gather feedback, focusing on neighborhoods and communities that may not typically attend town-sponsored meetings, Webb said. Based on feedback from those events, the town presented six options for the grant money that included a vegetable garden, new cooling fountains and misting systems, a community services fair, and the Jellyfishbot. The public chose the robot.
Roughly half of the $95,000 state grant went to purchasing Bumblebee. The other half will go towards park beautification and recreational programming.
At those events, residents consistently named water quality as a top concern, Webb said. An EPA-designated Superfund site, the New Bedford-Fairhaven Harbor has a long history of PCB contamination from past industrial activities. That’s why local and federal officials still discourage residents from eating seafood and shellfish caught in the harbor.
While most residents have learned to cast their lines somewhere else, Webb said town hall still receives regular complaints about floating trash and debris in the harbor.
“[Litter] is an issue that people call town hall about every couple of weeks,” Webb said. “Before a device like this, we would have actually had to send individuals with sticks and bags to do it by hand.”
Now, Estrella only has to secure a plastic net to Bumblebee’s frame and lower the battery-powered robot into the water. From there, a remote control — complete with a live video transmission and GPS — guides the robot through the murky water.
Similar machines are at work in California and on the Texas Gulf Coast, but Bumblebee is the only robot of its kind on the East Coast. The Jellyfishbot was designed by the French company IADYS, with Fairhaven staff traveling to the company’s Houston office in August to learn how to manage the robot.
Run by an entirely electric motor, the Jellyfishbot has a battery life of seven to 14 hours, depending on whether it’s running autonomously or manually. (Manual mode expends more battery life because humans tend to make more mistakes that take more energy to correct, Estrella explained.)
Autonomous or not, Estrella keeps a close eye on Bumblebee when it’s out in the water, lest the $46,000 robot gets hit by a much larger vessel. For now, the robot is under the care of the Harbormaster’s Office until the town finishes its charging station at the Fairhaven Public Safety Wharf.
Although residents will be happy to see the Jellyfishbot pick up litter, Bumblebee might be most useful helping with another persistent issue facing the harbor: oil spills.
Two years ago, a commercial fishing vessel spilled gallons of diesel fuel into the New Bedford-Fairhaven Harbor. Although the amount of fuel was unknown, it took the Fairhaven Fire Department 680 feet of absorbent boom (also known as “spaghetti” for its noodley shape) and 2,100 feet of absorbent sweep, along with several hundred absorbent pads, to help contain the spill.
Estrella admitted that these kinds of accidents are more common than the town would like, and while Fairhaven can typically get the offending vessel to pay for the cleanup, that’s not always the case.
Now, in the time it would take to assemble a manned crew to intercept the spill — which can very quickly expand across the water’s surface into a giant slick — the Jellyfishbot can simply drop down into the water, absorbent spaghetti in tow.
“It couldn’t clean up a whole oil spill on its own, just [as] one person couldn’t clean up an oil spill on their own,” Estrella said. “It’s a piece of the puzzle, and a piece that will help us get to the oil a lot faster, clean things up faster, and remediate things faster.”
On top of cleaning up trash and spills, the Jellyfishbot can also scan to a depth of 60 feet and use that data to create a map of the harbor floor, Webb said. That data helps the town monitor when its navigation channels might need to be dredged.
Its front-facing camera can examine vessels for leaks or other issues, or even help search hard-to-reach areas in the event of a missing persons case, Webb added.
Because the Jellyfishbot is still fairly new technology, Webb said the robot’s full capabilities might not be apparent at first. Its other function is simply to engender more shared responsibility for the harbor’s health and well-being.
“Hopefully by doing this simple act of cleaning… we can get more investment from people to do other steps in the future,” Webb said. “If they can see that tangible difference right in front of them, then there will hopefully be more buy-in.”
In the spirit of community participation, Fairhaven residents also got to vote on the name for the Jellyfishbot, narrowly choosing Bumblebee over a more controversial option: Tiny Tim.
“By just a couple votes, it would have been named after our harbormaster, Tim Cox,” Webb said. “Much to his chagrin.”
Estrella, Bumblebee’s main caretaker, had other ideas in mind.
“My chosen name would have been either Ishmael or Ahab, lending to the harbor’s literary history,” Estrella said. “I like the idea of it being a little bit of an Ahab. It knows that the fight might be bigger than itself, but it still goes out there and tries to get it done.”
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
Good luck with Bumblebee, kinda looks more like toy, and you have to wonder if it will stand the test of time. While keeping our waters clean is of great importance, there must be better ways to invest or use $46,000 dollars of state grant money.