State prepares for water By Advocate Staff Report5 May 2011 Mississippi River water encroaches upon the levee system at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola ferry landing Thursday, May 5, 2011.(Richard Alan Hannon/The Advocate) Corps: Bonnet Carre Spillway to open Monday The Bonnet Carré Spillway will be opened on Monday, May 9, due to high [...]
Morganza Spillway may be opened next week to divert Mississippi River By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune4 May 2011The Corps of Engineers may open the Morganza Spillway near Baton Rouge next week to divert massive amounts of Mississippi River water into the Atchafalaya Delta. It would mark the first time since 1973 that the diversion structure [...]
Environmental groups sue Chicago over its sewage By International Business Times4 May 2011Environmental groups on Tuesday sued the city of Chicago's water treatment authority, charging its sewage promotes algae growth that is choking Midwestern rivers and contributes to the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone." The federal lawsuit demands Chicago's Metropolitan Water Reclamation District deal with frequent [...]
Floods Raise Runoff Concerns By JEFFREY BALL, The Wall Street Journal5 May 2011 Workers use a boat to recover supplies from a flooded grain elevator in Caruthersville, Mo., a farm town along the swollen Mississippi River. The Ohio and Mississippi River levels were falling Wednesday at the site where engineers blasted holes in a Missouri [...]
Cleaning up Cedar Creek By Gailsburg Radio 14 WGIL30 April 2011A group of about 30 volunteers walked along the banks of Cedar Creek in Galesburg Saturday to pick up trash. The clean up is organized each year by the Galesburg Area Chamber of Commerce and Knox County Soil and Water Conservation District. Specialist Kara Downin [...]
Agriculture tied to gulf 'dead zone' By UPI.com28 April 2011CHAMPAIGN, Ill., April 28 (UPI) -- The spring rains drenching the U.S. Midwest may lead to an eventual environmental problem of oxygen "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers say. Researchers at the University of Illinois and Cornell University warn that phosphorus and nitrate pollution [...]
Iowa's future washing down the river By The Des Moines Register's Editorial15 April 2011 The proposed reorganization of Iowa's Department of Economic Development might be an example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. However pleasing such a rearrangement might be, it won't keep Iowa's economy from sinking. And Iowa's economy might well sink [...]
Search for Super Corn Seeks to Limit Nitrogen Use, Pollution By Jon Birger, Bloomberg Business Week15 April 2011 Illustrator: Yuko Kondo/Bloomberg Businessweek Marc Albertsen, the bespectacled, 62-year-old research director at Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont Co.’s seed-development unit, was catching up on paperwork one morning in July 2007 when he got a call from an assistant, Sharon [...]
Learn and play at LUMCON this weekend By Houma Today.com12 April 2011 HOUMA — Want to learn what creatures live at the bottom of the Gulf dead zone? Or go on an airboat ride into the marsh and get your hands on some of the Gulf’s sea life? Located near the end of the road [...]
Ancient Ocean 'Dead Zone' Delayed Life After Mass Extinction By Wynne Parry, LiveScience.com1 April 2011 A flood of nutrients may have created an oxygen-starved ocean about 250 million years ago, preventing life from bouncing back for a few million years after a mass extinction wiped out 90 percent of marine species, a new study indicates. [...]