As the highly polluted water is drained from the City of New Orleans back into Lake Ponchartrain, it will have to be monitored. In the last few years leading up to the Hurricane Katrina Disaster the Lake had actually been making a strong comeback and had been considered clean enough to fish in or use as drinking water for the neighboring cities with only a little extra filtering. All that has changed now after the many chemical spills, oil spills and human waste in the water that is now known as the Soup Bowl of New Orleans. It will take many years to get Lake Pontchartrain back in order again to the level it was just prior to the devastation from Katrina.
A new AUV Autonomous Underwater Vehicle research program at the Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute Research Facility is completely solar powered.
A group of these AUVs could work in a grid pattern constantly sampling the water and letting Environmental Monitoring engineers know where to put remediation chemicals in order to clean the lake. A recent research project called the RiverNet Project on Lake George, NY seems to hold the ticket to make this all possible. The Solar powered AUV will be able to detect any and all chemical or biological negative trends from the returned and now polluted lake water, which can assist in the management and careful timely improvement of the water quality. This S-AUV is also scheduled to assist in the remediation of the Hudson Bay with 3D sensor monitoring capabilities.
We need to use these modern technologies and research to help us contain the environmental eco-disaster component in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to protect the local and regional water quality for the protection of humans and the surrounding life. Think on this.
