It has been more than a year since the massive tsunami struck in Japan. The earthquake and tsunami washed millions of tons of debris in to the Pacific Ocean and till now the US government or the West Coast states do not have a plan for cleaning up the rubble that is still floating to the American shores.
The Japanese government has estimated that 1.5 million tons of debris is floating in the ocean due to the catastrophe. Moreover, some of the experts in the United States think that a bulk of the debris will never reach the shore along with fears of a massive slowly unfolding of a environmental disaster.
Chris Pallister, the president of a group dedicated to cleaning marine debris from the Alaska coastline says, “I think this is far worse than any oil spill that we’ve ever faced on the West Coast or any other environmental disaster we’ve faced on the West Coast” in terms of the debris’ weight, type and geographic scope”.
The Assistant administrator of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s National Oceanic Service, David Kennedy told US Senate panel last month that in most of the case the decision of the debris removal will fall on the individual states and the funding has not yet been determined.
