New Gulf Dead Zone Stretches From Louisiana To Alabama

[hatrack]

NEW ORLEANS — A new study finds that Louisiana's second Gulf of Mexico dead zone stretches at least from the Chandeleur Sound off Louisiana to Alabama's Dauphin Island — and could be bigger.

John Lopez, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, said Wednesday that the foundation was able to check only as far as the Mississippi-Alabama state line in 2011, but officials hope to get other states to extend the reach of studies that will start later in February.

In 2010, the foundation checked a 1,050-square-mile area in the Chandeleur Sound and found that it held too little oxygen to support life. The area found last July was 250 square miles.

"This is four times larger than the region found in 2010, because a much larger area was surveyed," Lopez wrote in a news release. A wider look is likely to find a still bigger area, possibly extending into the area off the Florida Panhandle, he said in an interview.

EDIT

http://blog.al.com/wire/2012/02/second_gulf_of_mexico_dead_zon.html

[demosincebirth]

1. With no proper regulation in those gulf states, what to you expect?

[XemaSab]

3. I suspect that every state from

New Mexico to Montana to Saskatchewan to Minnesota to New York to North Carolina is responsible.

Blaming the gulf states is a myopic look at the problem.

[demosincebirth]

4. those states control the delta and everything that comes and goes through it. Thirty years

ago the SF bay was so polluted it smelled like raw sewage every place you went along the bay. Now, its not pristine, but people now fish the bounty of the bay. We still have a lot of work to do on it, but it improves every day. This just did not happen by itself,,,they passed laws and regulations, with stiff fines for anyone found polluting the bay.. You are even fined if they catch anyone pouring used car oil or chemicals in our street drains, or in our yards which they all drain into the bay. Unregulated or not enough regulation causes what is happening in the gulf zone. It just didn't happen over night, it began 30-40 years ago.

[jpak]

6. The Dead Zone is caused by fertilizer applied in the Corn Belt traveling down the Mississippi

There is little those states can do to restrict fertilizer use in Iowa.

[phantom power]

2. "A wider look is likely to find a still bigger area"

oh boy.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. No word about all of BP's oil being a contributor??

[Nihil]

7. In the scale of things - time as well as volume - it really wasn't that significant an event.

Sure, the Deepwater Horizon screwup was "a contributor" but compared to all of the other
"contributions" over the years, it wasn't a biggie (except in the fact that the media actually
noticed it).