So Not Our Sodium

By Julia Reischel on Tue, Sep 11, 2007 6:15 pm

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Despite the fact that MIT has a not-so-secret yearly ritual of dropping sodium into the Charles and a chunck of sodium in the Charles injured five people last week, MIT isn't sure that the two incidents are related.

An article in The Tech today stressed that "it is unclear at this point whether the sodium is connected to MIT," and quoted various MIT officials making non-committal noises about the university's involvement.

This means that the Charles River Clean Up Boat, an organization that's gamely removed the detritus of our nasty college town from the water for years, is stuck holding the bag its own decontamination bills.

When the Clean Up Boat came across a chunk of unexploded sodium last Thursday, they thought it was a "rough piece of Styrafoam about 2” in diameter and 10” long." So they fished it out of the water with a pool skimmer and put it in one of their on-board trash bins. Where it exploded.

This set a rather costly series of events in motion, according to a mass email sent out today by Tom McNichol, the president of the Clean Up Boat:

"The police examined the boat until 9:30 PM and then called me to pick it up," he wrote. "Since I was in Framingham, I call Community Boating and they agreed to tow it to one of their mooring until I could pick it up in the morning. While towing the boat, water inside shifted and contacted some undetected, residual sodium and it flashed again. They called the fire department. Who in turn called me, demanding I get a de-contamination crew there immediately . . . The decontamination started at 9:00 AM and finished about 2:30 in the afternoon . . . The whole interior of the boat had to be de-contaminated."

Full-scale chemical decontaminations aren't cheap. McNichol says that the cost is threatening to put the Clean Up Boat out of business, because, at the moment, MIT isn't responsible.

"The police are still investigating the source of the sodium," he concluded his email. "As of now I do not know who is responsible. I do know that the Clean Up Boat is responsible for the bill to de-contaminate the boat and obliged to pay it. We do not have any money to pay this bill, and are requesting help from any source. I do not know the amount today, but it is significant to us as we operate on a year to year basis, and have no reserves."

I know you don't have $34.9 billion like Harvard, MIT, but come on. Shell out.