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One day last summer the air was dead, and it was 101 degrees outside. I put on my shorts, grabbed a life vest, and walked down to the dock to fire up my old jet ski for a quick trip to cool off.
As I started the engine, in the calm water and bright sun I noticed an oily sheen growing from the stern. My jet ski seemed to be leaking fuel into the lake. If spilling gas in the lake is illegal, I wondered how a manufacturer can legally get away with selling jet skis? I decided I needed to learn more. At my office, I Googled “jet ski pollution.” There were many links to choose from. For example, I learned that a day’s ride on a PWC (personal watercraft) gives off the same pollution as driving 100,000 miles in a car! Another article said a PWC drops 2–3 gallons of oil and gas into the water every couple of hours of riding. I found page after page describing the horrors of PWCs: air, water, and noise pollution. Either PWCs are choking Lake Fenton, or the authors will say anything to get my jet ski off the lake. I needed a second point of view. After a little more searching, I found the website for the Personal Watercraft Industry Association so I could learn the other side of the story. Sure enough, there was another side. In the early 90’s several environmental groups pressured Congress to ban jet skis on government-owned lakes and rivers. The amount of pollution put out by the newly popular PWC was alarming. Congress heard so much testimony condemning jet skis even the industry was embarrassed. So the PWC folks sat down with the Environmental Protection Agency and developed a plan to “clean up” jet skis beginning in 1996. By 2002, PWC manufacturers had met all the EPA targets by adopting a variety of improvements, including increased use of four-stroke engines, fuel-injected two-stroke engines and the use of catalytic converters. These changes reduced emissions by approximately 75% compared to pre-regulation models. At the same time, noise was drastically reduced, making the PWC of today much quieter than the pre-2002 models. With this new information, I re-read the websites complaining about jet ski pollution. Sure enough, the articles arguing against PWCs were written before 2002. Some of the articles reasonably argue that pollution continues as the result of old jet skis still in service, while others deceptively quoted out-of-date statistics to make their point. Bottom line: over time, the lake will continue to get cleaner as older jet skis are retired. It is not a perfect solution, but it is a fair one. I also learned that in spite of the terrible-looking oil slick created by my jet ski (in fact, by all two-stroke engines) all of the gasoline evaporates within 48 hours. This leaves a small amount of oil in the water – not a happy fact, but not nearly as bad as I had originally imagined. Unfortunately, my jet ski was made before 2002. Selling it to someone else on the lake does not make any sense, so I will keep it around for the few hours a year I ride it, and then scrap it when it finally dies. However, if I had teenagers, or put many hours on a jet ski (or any boat with an old two-stroke engine) every summer, I would definitely want a clean-running model manufactured after 2002. Some things really are better than they used to be. |