Word: bays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Shellfish beds in Texas have been closed eleven times in the past 18 months because of pollution. Crab fisheries in Lavaca Bay, south of Galveston, were forced to shut down when dredging work stirred up mercury that had settled in the sediment. In neighboring Louisiana 35% of the state's oyster beds are closed because of sewage contamination. Says Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane: "These waters are nothing more than cocktails of highly toxic substances...
...Pacific coastal waters are generally cleaner than most, but they also contain pockets of dead -- and deadly -- water. Seattle's Elliott Bay is contaminated with a mix of copper, lead, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals once widely used by the ( electrical-equipment industry. "The bottom of this bay is a chart of industrial history," says Thomas Hubbard, a water-quality planner for Seattle. "If you took a core sample, you could date the Depression, World War II. You could see when PCBs were first used and when they were banned and when lead was eliminated from gasoline...
...Francisco Bay is also contaminated with copper, nickel, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals from industrial discharges. Last year toxic discharges increased 23%. In Los Angeles urban runoff and sewage deposits have had a devastating impact on coastal ecosystems, notably in Santa Monica Bay, which gets occasional floods of partly processed wastes from a nearby sewage- treatment plant during heavy rainstorms. Off San Diego's Point Loma, a popular haunt of skin divers, the waters are so contaminated with sewage that undersea explorers run the risk of bacterial infection...
Some foreign shores are no better off. Remote beaches on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula are littered with plastics and tires. Fish and birds are being choked out of Guanabara Bay, the entryway to Rio de Janeiro, by sewage and industrial fallout. Japan's Inland Sea is plagued by 200 red tides annually; one last year killed more than 1 million yellowtail with a potential market value of $15 million. In the North Sea chemical pollutants are believed to have been a factor in the deaths of 1,500 harbor seals this year. Last spring the Scandinavian fish industry was hard...
...stopover in San Francisco's wetlands, where they feast on clams and mussels that contain high concentrations of cadmium, mercury and lead. Says Biologist Gregory Karras of Citizens for a Better Environment: "The birds become so polluted, there is a risk from eating ducks shot in the South Bay...