Port of Stockton: Water Hyacinth Removal

My name is Rick, Rick Hatton, and I run a company that takes aquatic weeds out of the water. For the Port of Stockton, we're removing the hyacinth that you'll see out there in the water floating. Water hyacinth is a plant that floats. It does not have roots that go down and touch the sediment, the dirt, and that's why you'll see it moving all over. As the tide comes in and out, as the winds blow, this plant just floats along. It's coming in thick right at this time of the year. It looks like a science fiction movie. You're coming in on a big ship at night and you're looking on your radar. What you see is something in the water. What is it? Well, safety first. You stop the boat. We don't want that. We want the ships to come in, so we want to make their entrance into the port one that's safe and comfortable, and that's why we're taking these plants away. We're making it look like clear water. Come on in. What we're using to take the hyacinth out of the water is something called an aquatic weed harvester. You can see one of them over here on my left. So we go through the water and any plant that's in the boat's path, it gets gobbled up. It comes up a conveyor belt onto the boat. It holds about two to two hundred and fifty cubic feet of plant. When the boat's full, then we come into shore. We throw it into a large pile and just let it rot. Now there is some talk about local communities that grow food and they would like to receive this for composting, so there's a good chance it'll go there. The Port of Stockton, of course, wants to get rid of the hyacinth that's hindering its ship activity. They want us to also go way downriver to downtown Stockton. It's clogging it. It looks terrible. The port wants to be a good citizen of this city and has already authorized us to go down there and clean that area. Everyone's working together to try and stop this problem, but it looks like it's more of a maintenance issue. I don't think it'll ever go away, but we can work together to maintain it to a level that's acceptable.