Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 6:16 pm Post subject: could it happen here?
Man-of-war stings boy, 12
7/23/06 By JASON KOLNOS
STAFF WRITER
HARWICH PORT - Yesterday morning's strong winds provided David Van Iderstine and his three sons with stellar body surfing conditions off their private beach at the end of Braddock Road.
But the cresting waves also brought an unwanted neon blue siphonophore, a Portuguese man-of-war, which gave 12-year-old Reid Van Iderstine the shock of his young life.
The elder Van Iderstine first noticed people hovering over an object on the shoreline, just west of Bank Street beach, shortly after 1 p.m. Then Reid quickly ran out of the water and onto the sand, screaming.
''We noticed a big long lesion across the upper calf of his right leg, just below the back of his knee joint,'' Van Iderstine said. ''It looked like someone took a big piece of spaghetti and glued it to his leg.''
Reid's yelps of agony increased as the welt got bigger and more swollen.
''My dad had to help me back to the cottage because I couldn't walk because it hurt so bad,'' Reid said.
Van Iderstine was convinced it was a man-of-war sting, which was corroborated when the concerned father examined the curious object along the shoreline. There lay the gooey football-sized man-of-war, a cousin of the jellyfish that is actually a colony of interdependent organisms.
Harwich paramedics arrived and irrigated Reid's leg with sterile water. They used plastic paddles to gently scrape some man-of-war residue off the boy's leg because it was feared that some stingers were still lodged in his skin.
A baking powder mixture helped draw out the poison.
Reid wasn't transported to the hospital because he didn't have an allergic reaction to the sting and was feeling better once the pain subsided, said his father, who is a volunteer firefighter in New Salem.
Reid said he thought the man-of-war's tentacles must have stung him on its way onto shore, though he didn't see it in the water. ''I thought it must have been a crab or I hit some shells,'' he said. ''But it was like a really, really bad wasp sting.''
Harwich firefighter Shawn Piche said the nearby public Bank Street beach was not closed, but the department ''made sure the lifeguards knew that one had been found and to be aware.''
Portuguese man-of-wars, whose stings are rarely life-threatening but definitely painful, have caused others to flee Cape waters.
More than a dozen people have been stung by Portuguese man-of-wars in Cape waters this summer.
At least eight people sought assistance after being stung by man-of-wars at Falmouth beaches in early July and five people were reported stung at a Chilmark beach.
I was reading your above post, when i started to smile...
It was not the fact about the terrible pain from the portuguese man of war stings, but the header.................................
...........................................could it happen here?
The smile was the thought of the "new port", and the story was from the Staff writer,Harwich port............
Its a funny old world, as Victor Mouldy would say..........lol........
There was an in depth examination into the humble cotton tee shirt on BBC world radio tonight and some of the points raised made my hair stand on end for instance 100,000 hectares of Benin (west coast) deforestation is happening every year to grow the cotton and it's much worse in Brazil. American farmers sell an equivalent amount of cotton enough to make a tee shirt from for 10 cents but it is grown in an arid part of the US and they use 2,000 liters of water for each tee shirt.
We of course are doing our bit by importing the stuff, apparently on average each of us landfill 63 pounds by weight of clothing every year.
Some people interviewed confessed they sometimes do not actually wear the things they have bought on their shopping sprees.
So lets concrete an SSSI and build a port to enable all this.
Think what is so scary is the fact that ports world wide are congested and cannot cope due to the massive amounts of cheap imports that the "developed" world is bringing in and the exports that are pouring out of certain countries in the FE.
I certainly know that in the UK we are currently importing about 2/3 more than we are exporting.
No concreting not yet started even Felixstowe South has been delayed.
HPUK claim that they will have partially built the Harwich container dock by 2017.
There will be a road inquiry before they can build anything over here.
The SSSI is very valuable to our area cleaning up pollution through natural processes, a staggering amount yearly.
Under Bathside Bay are the outer limits of the underground aquifers that go through the chalk beds to London and Essex, it is considered that these will be punctured and saline impacts can follow ruining the aquifers.
Pepsi,
I forgot to mention that in the USA they are beginning to recognize that ports are near other developments and are restricting the size of the footprints, in response the ports are improving the throughput within the existing footprints.
Nothing new here, at the Dibden Bay inquiry the port owner said he needed the extra footprint "no other way of doing it" but after refusal they found a way of upgrading the port whilst actually in use and now have increased capacity enormously.
When this was raised at the BB inquiry HPUK said they could not upgrade whilst port in use.
It is a little known fact that a considerable part of Felixstowe dock is too shallow for the largest ships and just upgrading would help their throughput.
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