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While it’s a pretty bad year in the Gulf of Mexico already, due to the Horizon well blowout, this year it seems the Dead Zone is worse than ever, too. Being a great neighbor doesn’t seem to be a characteristic of the U.S. in so many ways, so this one should come as no surprise.
The Gulf of Mexico faces a renewed and enlarged threat to marine life: a low-oxygen “dead zone” about the size of Massachusetts, caused by chemical runoff into the Mississippi River that flows into the sea.
The dead zone, which occurs in Gulf waters in summer and is unrelated to BP Plc’s oil spill, covers an area twice as large as last year, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study released this week. The low-oxygen area this year is the fifth-largest since measurements began in 1985.
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The western Gulf of Mexico, including the dead zone, will have a shrimp harvest of about 45.2 million pounds this year, 20 percent below the historical average, according to the Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Galveston.
That shrimp industry, along with so much else, is taking quite a beating from our carelessness.
What happens to the Gulf as we dump ever more of our poisons into the water is another real loss to us all. We depend on our waters for so much, it seems that we need to make an effort for our own sake to clean it up. The household wastes, farm runoff, and industrial pollutions flowing into our waters are poisoning our own well of life.
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We’ve made conditions even worse in the Gulf with the oil spill, the dispersants and other pollution we haven’t been tracking very well. It’s not just the Gulf, either; we are killing all of our waterways, including the Great Lakes, exemplified by a particularly large dead zone in Lake Erie. If we were counting on our freshwater lakes as a Plan B for seafood, we need to think again.
Eastern coast is also experiencing tar balls and massive fish kills. IS this from the BP oil, that the Administration said vanished and they could not find?
The appearance of a dead zone off the coast of SW Florida every year, caused by Mississippi agriculture fertilizer run off, is expected these days – but I wonder how much worse it will be after the oil disaster in the Gulf and those “no oxygen dead zone by bacteria that eat oil” areas merge with the annual Mississippi gift.
In Mass we had a Menhaden fish kill of about 10,000 from schools swimming into no oxygen areas of the marshes near agriculture run off and town grass growing efforts. I remember the 50′s TV commercial “a better life through chemicals”, put out by DuPont as I recall – but perhaps it was Monsanto or some trade group – in any case, thanks folks.
Lack of EPA enforcement, corporate disregard for the environment in favor of profits, and the public’s overall ignorance and apathy are destroying so much. A disporportionate amount of the environmental assualt seems to take place in the South, either from factory run-off, agri run-off or mining pollution. We needed improvement in regs more than a decade ago as corporate interests gained power. Then Bush came in and nuetered all the regs and agencies. Obama does not appear to have a BOLD bone in his body and it is doubtful that anything meaningful will be done. It appears that Obama lives to appease the GOP hoping above all that someday they will embrace him, which is about as likely as hell freezing over. We have spent almost a decade in a War over oil. The next one may well be over clean water or a food supply that is not tainted.
Hey, maybe they’ll cancel each other out..
Fat chance, I know. Unfortunately, this is a bit like the pollution problems we’re seeing in the Puget Sound – for the most part, it’s not due to point sources, but to widespread use of a substance. Given how much influence big agricultural companies have on DC, I don’t see this being fixed any time soon.
I agree
While point sources can be controlled by current law, Congressional control by agriculture fertilizer companies can not be mitigated – and their product will not be improved until they are forced to do so. They always tell us “do you want to eat?” as the counter – implying higher yield and less ground devoted to growing is more important that not poisoning us and the planet.
VIDEO: BP Coverup of Environmental Catastrophe in the Gulf: Dead Birds, Fish, Turtles, and Mammals
Dead Fish Washing Up Everywhere Due to BP Oil Spill and Dispersants
Thanks, all, for your observations. I can’t help reflecting on what would happen if this sort of spillage of poisonous materials were being effected on land that was used for, say, farming. There would be a huge response, hopefully. Toxic zones would be treated and it would be cleaned up by the perpetrators. Unhappily, though, in the case of industrial farming, such as huge pig farms, there are not the controls we would expect, and the downstream neighbors of such farms are fighting out the kind of repairs that we ought to take for granted. Our polluters have gained a great deal of freedom from the laws, a damage to us all that needs to be brought to an end at sea, and on land.