Word: river
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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...
...where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river has been found to carry the germs of tuberculosis, encephalitis, polio, cholera, hepatitis and typhoid. We'd heard stories about people entering the U.S. by floating along...
...doesn't grow by itself. In 2006 U.S. farmers used more than 21 million tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and other fertilizers to boost their crops, and all those chemicals have consequences far beyond the immediate area. When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land, the chemicals enhance the rapid development of algae in the water. When the algae die and decompose, the process sucks all the oxygen...
...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 to seize...
...Even though Ray Slach's farm in West Branch, east of Iowa City, isn't near a swollen river, he's had his share of troubles - most recently, hail damage to some crops from a fierce storm on Saturday that included a brief tornado. "We're assessing now whether it's a total loss or we can replant or it will come back," says Slach, who farms 1800 acres of corn and soybeans. "We're not going to have yields like we had last year...