Alarming ‘dead zone’ grows in the Chesapeake

[Forkboy]

A giant underwater “dead zone” in the Chesapeake Bay is growing at an alarming rate because of unusually high nutrient pollution levels this year, according to Virginia and Maryland officials. They said the expanding area of oxygen-starved water is on track to become the bay’s largest ever.

This year’s Chesapeake Bay dead zone covers a third of the bay, stretching from the Baltimore Harbor to the bay’s mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when it was last measured in late June. It has since expanded beyond the Potomac into Virginia, officials said.

Especially heavy flows of tainted water from the Susquehanna River brought as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as normally comes in an entire average year, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources researcher said. As a result, “in Maryland we saw the worst June” ever for nutrient pollution, said Bruce Michael, director of the DNR’s resource assessment service.

That’s bad news for biologists who monitor the bay and horrible news for oysters and fish. Dead zones suck out oxygen from deep waters and kill any marine life that can’t get out of the way.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/alarming-dead-zone-grows-in-the-chesapeake/2011/07/20/gIQABRmKXI_story.html

[Mimosa]

1. Chesapeak Bay also has a problem which helped destroy Louisiana's wetlands

Nutria are part of the problem, too.

http://www.chesapeakebay.net/nutria.aspx?menuitem=16941

We all need to put the health of coastal wetlands much higher on the list of national priorities.

[kenny blankenship]

2. To make matters worse, and I mean literally *in order to* make matters worse,

House Republicans are passing have passed a bill to let states determine their own levels of acceptable environmental degradation, and taking standards setting power away from EPA. It's up to the Senate to stop it.

House GOP Passes Dirty-Water Bill
July 14, 2011 1:32 pm ET — Walid Zafar

Last night, the House passed the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act, an antiregulatory measure sponsored by Rep. John Mica (R-FL) that strips the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to update clean water standards. The bill passed with the strong support of the mining and coal industries.

The anti-EPA measure is part of a sustained campaign to cripple the agency after it issued an endangerment finding listing carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Earlier in the year, for instance, House Republicans introduced legislation to prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouses gases altogether and to "bar the government from using any environmental law to fight global warming pollution."

In other words, if the EPA approves a standard but later finds that the standard was inadequate, the legislation would prohibit the agency from addressing those new findings. In a letter to Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY), the ranking member of the Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee, the agency warned that the legislation would prohibit it from "taking action without state concurrence even in the face of significant scientific information demonstrating threats to human health or aquatic life."

[Forkboy]

4. Well, that's reassuring.

:scared:

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. I read somewhere it started

somewhere up the Potomac River
and James River, due to Putrid Bullshit.