Word: mississippis
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...Grand Tower residents are anxiously watching the surrounding rivers. Stubborn bands of storms have saturated the region's corn and soybean fields, swelling the Mississippi River and its tributaries above St. Louis, Mo. Today the rising waters were only about two hours' drive to the north. Some 21 Illinois counties and all of Missouri have been declared disaster zones, and dozens of points along the Mississippi River's levees in both states have ruptured. "We're just standing by, hoping for the best but expecting the worst," says Burke "Bear" Ellett, 49, Grand Tower's mayor for the past dozen...
Grand Tower sits along one of the Mississippi's narrowest points, across from Missouri. A levee runs along what remains of Main Street, but it's weak. That puts Grand Tower in a flood plain. Floods have repeatedly battered the town. And a handful of folks here recall 1947, when the Mississippi sent some 1,000 residents racing for the rocky hills above town...
...response to the growing problem, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - along with several other federal groups and the governments of states that feed into the Mississippi - released a plan of attack on Monday to reduce the Gulf's dead zone. The plan, an update of an effort launched in the waning days of the Clinton Administration in 2001, looks to harness state and federal action to reduce the flow of fertilizer into the Mississippi, much of which comes from agricultural sources that aren't covered by the regulations of the Clean Water Act. The ultimate goal is to shrink...
...scientists from Louisiana State University (LSU) and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium estimated that this year's dead zone would be more than 10,000 sq. mi., roughly the size of Massachusetts. But that prediction was made before massive floods hit the Midwest: with the flow of the Mississippi at dangerous levels, and with rains sweeping fertilizer off drowned farms, the dead zone could grow even bigger. The Louisiana fishing industry, the second largest in the nation, is already hurting, with shrimp catches falling in the dead zone's wake. The U.S. is not alone in grappling with this aquatic...
...zone. Although Grumbles points out that an action plan isn't the same thing as a budget allocation, there's little evidence that anyone is prepared to bear the financial burden of drastically reducing fertilizer runoff in the Midwest. (It doesn't help that 31 states feed into the Mississippi River basin, or that multiple federal agencies are involved with the dead-zone task force.) A 2007 report by the National Research Council called for more aggressive leadership by the EPA to coordinate and oversee state activities along the Mississippi, but the agency doesn't seem ready or able...