I hate litterers. Whenever I see someone throw a candy wrapper on the ground, I secretly hope that they choke on their candy. Every time I see a cigarette butt get tossed out the window, I secretly hope that person's car explodes. Okay, that's untrue... my hopes are no secret.
Our latest idiot, Dwight Everett Foster, is a big, bad litterbug. Dwight lives in Santa Rosa County, Florida. He had a boat. A one-ton 18-foot 1986 Four Winns 190 Horizon boat. One day he decided he didn't want that boat anymore, so he removed the registration tags and the vehicle identification number, and then he and his son drove that boat to an undeveloped subdivision near his house and dumped it. 'Cause, you know, that's what you do with a boat you don't want.
Well, the local sheriff's office didn't like seeing an abandoned boat out there, so they did a little investigating. Since there was no visible identification on the boat itself, the investigating deputy turned to the Internet. Google Earth, actually. He examined the neighborhoods near the undeveloped subdivision where the boat was abandoned, looking for anyone who had a boat at the time the satellite images were taken. He saw a fuzzy image of the boat at Dwight's house.
Dwight was questioned, confessed to dumping the boat, and then was arrested on a felony charge of littering more than 500 pounds of waste. A felony! Ha! He now faces a $5,000 fine and a maximum of 5 years in jail. Three days after the arrest, Dwight's son got the boat and took it to the Santa Rosa County Landfill (where he should have taken it in the first place). How much did it cost to dispose of the boat properly? $18.
(Now to copy the MasterCard ads...)
Cost to legally dump a boat at the landfill: $18
Penalty for illegally abandoning a boat: $5,000
An idiot litterbug getting what he deserves... priceless!
All thanks to Google Earth. Google... is there anything it can't do?
(Information for this post came from these sites: http://www.pnj.com/article/
How funny. We had a boat we needed to get rid of once. Why didn't I think of just abandoning it in some neighborhood? I had to call someone and bed them to come drag it away.
ReplyDeleteOops...typo. I begged them. I did not bed them. This almost turned into a whole other kind of blog.
Ha! I was going to suggest that maybe their fee was a bit too high, and that a little shopping around would have been a good idea.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you didn't have to bed someone.
Brad will definitely agree with the google bit. That is pretty ingenius :) Haha Justin, you're awesome.
ReplyDeleteI'm also glad that Tammy didn't have to bed anyone. "A whole other kind of blog" indeed.
ReplyDeleteDumb, dumb, Dwight. Big, bad litterer.