Seeking feedback-Marina Bay Marina Ft Lauderdale

That marina is right down the street from my office. It is well kept and there is a good restaurant bar at the waters edge. Convienent location for storage, a long ride to the ocean however.
Like all of the marinas in that area, including at my office, the boats there get dirty very quickly with soot and dust. RT 95 and Rt 595 are so close and the airport is nearby also.

I agree with Tucker. While you do get dirt from the planes and roads, it is a great place. Well run with lots of amenities. Pool, hot tub, movie room, comp. room, gym, nice bar and restaurant, shuttle bus to the boat show, etc .

Stayed there for a year and a half or so myself.

I agree with the other two posters. It is close to Marine parts stores and vendors and companies that work on yachts. However aside from the little restaurant, it's far from other restaurants and is a long ride to the ocean. It has a good waterway to use a tender to travel to restaurants and stuff. The boats do get dirty quickly. There are a lot of nice amenities like a nice pool and stuff and usually lots of good looking 20-40yr old women around the pool.....

As opposed to "not so good looking 40 to 60 year old's"?

hahahaha, well they say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The apartments at Marina Bay are a hotbed for hot women. I used to manage a Striker in there and my stern was right in front of the pool, talk about being distracted. There were always a few hotties at that pool......it didn't matter which day of the week it was......not to mention a few trolling down the dock.

Hmm, I always thought the soot and dust comes from the power plant at Port Everglades: With the winds usually East-SouthEast everything West of the plant get dirty, including my boat, my house, etc.

Rumor says they are burning used motoroil at night, not sure if that is true, but they do spew out a lot of dirty pollution whatever they are burning.

The plant director must have a picture of the mayor at a farm or some such thing as the pollution has been going on for years and the officials don't seem to mind...

Hi,

I would have thought that this would not be too difficult to check out.

Licensed Oil Disposal companies have to keep records and have that information open to scrutiny from potential customers as a part of the service because if the company that takes it off your boat then dumps it down the storm water system you are as liable as the company that did the dumping.

Make out to your local Oil Recyclers that you have a large yacht coming to town and want to get rid of 10,000 lts waste oil ask for evidence of where they dispose of it.

Thanks, I just may do that....

I've never heard of FPL burning used oil in Port Everglades, I have heard that they burn coal at night. Whose to say. I had a customer that had a large refinery in Atlanta and he used to turn the used motor oil into offroad diesel.

"I have heard that they burn coal at night. Whose to say."

Who is to say? FPL. the State of Florida, the EPA, lots of people who keep track of these things, not to mention anyone who has flown into or out of FLL and looked out the window ... the plant at Port Everglades burns heavy oil and natural gas.

I too agree with Norseman about the source of the soot and am glad to see someone else mention it. The amount and location of the soot fallout just doesn't seem to match what might be expected of the amount of traffic and wind patterns at FLL. There seems to be a real lack of studies available to show the source of Fort Lauderdale's soot and the only one I have been able to find shows more soot in the port than anywhere else including the airport. That report was prepared a few years ago and air traffic has increased but jet engine particulate matter emissions have dropped radically since then as well.

Having spent almost as many years around jet fuel burners as steam plants I can say that I never have bought the story that the airport is responsible for all the soot that coats Lauderdale, especially along the beach north of the port. I couldn't use the balcony on my 14th floor apartment on A1A near Oakland Park most of the time because of soot. And I know that it didn't come from aircraft departing FLL in the middle of the night.

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/06/05606.pdf

Interesting reading: I live in the Citrus Isle area mentioned in the report which is real close to the Marina Bay facilities in this thread.

The same soot can be expected on the boats in Marina Bay except when coldfronts blow through in the winter and the wind clocks around 360 degrees spreading the soot in every direction and giving us a break...

I would think a filter on the power plant would be a fairly simple and low tech solution and would gladly pay a few $$ extra to FPL to breathe clean ocean air instead of the stuff they are pumping out from the chimneys now..

Supposedly these people have an air-quality program, but it may be just window dressing judging from the sh!t collecting on my boat and the canvas.

http://www.broward.org/air/

Why are you so argumentative? I said that I've never heard that FPL burned waste oil in the Port. It does not mean that they don't burn waste oil, I personally have never heard about it. There are A LOT of contributing factors to the soot in the area surrounding the 7 miles around the Port. You have a very large airport, the Port, the Power Plant in the port (and don't forget there is the garbage burning powerplant on 441 and SR 84). You also have all of the yards with paint fallout, and a lot of vehicular traffic on I95 and 595. So it's really hard to pinpoint exactly where it is coming from, or if it is a combination of all things. I have kept yachts at Bahia Mar which is 1.5 miles due North of the Port and never ever had any soot issues. I've even had yachts walking distance south of the Powerplant at Harbortowne and never had a soot issue. It seems to be more concentrated in the Marina Bay area and west. I would say the soot in Marina Bay is most closely related to the Airport (less then 3/4 of a mile away), and I95 which is literally 200 yards from the Marina.

I worked on a yacht in Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club in Boca. We were very far away from anything like that. But we would get a ton of soot/fallout it was more like ashes, when the wind blew from the North or Northwest and that was from the burning of the sugar cane fields over 20 miles away. So soot can travel quite a distance.

Hi,

It should not be hard to find out if there is any substance to this either.

Do you reckon they are burning lump or pulverised coal?

Coal is not like Oil, it isn't stored in tanks so can't be easily disguised as to what it is.

The amount of Coal required to keep the FPL Plant going ain't going to be arriving in sacks on a dray either.

How many dry bulkers come in to Pt Everglades and discharge at the Coal Terminal? Pt Everglades does have a Coal Terminal right???

Then of course there will be the conveyor belts and or railway wagons that go from the Coal Terminal to the Power Plant. Then there will be the stockpiles around the Power Plant.

If none of the infrastructure listed above is visible in the area of the plant then it is either underground or doesn't exist which means that the plant ain't burning coal at night.

This is the sort of stuff they are likely to be burning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orimulsion

Large eruptions of soot can be attributed to blowing the tubes something that is best done at night if you don't want people to see all the rubbish and pollution being discharged into the air.

Looks like they run the plant on diesel fuel as per this article from 2002:

June 2003:

Video of Port Everglades Power Plant burning nasty stuff at night and belching out black smoke:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLNdlhNfPwU

"Why are you so argumentative?"

Because I have little patience with people who post misleading information. Unless you are trying to ignore the fact, you did write that "you heard" they burned coal and then wrote "Whose (sic) to say." My non-argumenative answer was to list the information sources who know.

"I said that I've never heard that FPL burned waste oil in the Port."

I never said you did.

The infrastructure to support a coal fired plant is obvious to everyone and that includes English majors and fish boat skippers.

"Looks like they run the plant on diesel fuel as per this article from 2002:"

It looks more like typical print media and politician's ignorance. FPL is required to disclose the type, price, source, and quantity of fuel purchased for each powerplant. The last one I could find without a great deal of searching (which I won't bother to do) shows that the Port Everglades plant bought 385,000 barrels of No. 6 fuel oil (Bunker C - residual oil) in April of 2008. There are another 8 or so of these around since they are monthly but do tend to lag by a bit.

http://www.psc.state.fl.us/library/FILINGS/01/15191-01/15191-01.PDF
http://www.psc.state.fl.us/library/filings/08/06267-08/06267-08.pdf

I don't believe they changed from #6 to diesel between their September 2001 filing and the March 6, 2002 meeting then back to #6 again. Heavy fuel is used to power large slow-speed diesels that are used in some shore based plants but rarely if ever #6 as that is just one step above asphalt. The heavy fuel used in diesels is blended with distillates to a viscosity around that of heavy lube oil.

They have electrostatic precipitators to collect soot and I believe they also use a water wash to remove particulates and acid from the stack gas. But again, all oil fired boilers need to blow tubes at least once a day and that can produce some spectacular soot clouds from a marine boiler.

I personally think that video is a bit misleading. I don't know what kind of camera was used but if it was recording infrared as well as visual then the "belching smoke" is the thermal and water vapor plume, not particulate matter. Notice how the plume morphed into a real cloud once it reached a certain altitude? For every pound of fuel burned there is nearly a pound of water produced and that goes up the stack and that vapor condenses to form a cloud when it cools to dewpoint.

Power plant operators don't "blow tubes" on every steam generator in a plant at the same time ... that is really playing Russian roulette with the lights ... the power output has to be reduced and air flow increased during a blow and it is not unheard of to lose the fires, so blowing all four at once is not likely.

Perhaps hard to see on a small photo, but the dark stuff is soot on my window sill from the last few months. The white area in the middle is where I scraped off dust with a finger a few minutes ago.
The area is under an awning so rain never washed the dust away..

We used heavy fuel on the big ships as well, but had to heat it first to make it usable, straight diesel for going in and out of ports.
Plenty of soot on deck behind funnels. Also we blew boilers periodically with spectacular black clouds as a result.

Looks familiar over at Port Everglades.

Thought the same after I posted it, could be a bunch or water vapor..

As per severeal Google searches they have reduced emissions by 70% the last 8 or 9 years, but some websites are reporting the plant to be among the worst polluters in the country

My window sills confirm they should do like Avis and "Try Harder"