Erin Jordan / The Gazette 3 December 2018 Chapter 1: America’s Midwest faces worsening trouble with undrinkable well water, recreational lakes choked with toxic algae and water treatment plants requiring budget-busting upgrades to remove pollution washing from farm fields and industries. A government task force said in 2008 it would cut nitrate and phosphorus [...]

Erin Jordan / The Gazette2 December 2018 'They need to say it's against the law to pollute downstream' Tommy Olander Jr. on Aug. 9 drives his family's shrimping boat in Vermillion Bay off the Louisiana coast near Jeanerette. Vermillion Bay, inland of the oxygen-deprived “dead zone,” was expected soon to be full of shrimp [...]

Max Freund / The Gazette2 December 2018 The hypoxic, or low-oxygen, mass of water in Louisiana coastal waters west of the Mississippi River is often called the dead zone because fish, shrimp and other species that can swim away do because there’s too little oxygen to survive. The size of the dead zone has [...]