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Tag: Water environment

  • Could trawler cams help save world’s dwindling fish stocks?

    Could trawler cams help save world’s dwindling fish stocks?

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    PORTLAND, Maine — For years, Mark Hager’s job as an observer aboard New England fishing boats made him a marked man, seen as a meddling cop on the ocean, counting and scrutinizing every cod, haddock and flounder to enforce rules and help set crucial quotas.

    On one particularly perilous voyage, he spent 12 days at sea and no crew member uttered even a single word to him.

    Now Hager is working to replace such federally-mandated observers with high-definition cameras affixed to fishing boat masts. From the safety of his office, Hager uses a laptop to watch hours of footage of crew members hauling the day’s catch aboard and measuring it with long sticks marked with thick black lines. And he’s able to zoom in on every fish to verify its size and species, noting whether it is kept or flung overboard in accordance with the law.

    “Once you’ve seen hundreds of thousands of pounds of these species it becomes second nature,” said Hager as he toggled from one fish to another.

    Hager’s Maine-based start-up, New England Maritime Monitoring, is one of a bevy of companies seeking to help commercial vessels comply with new U.S. mandates aimed at protecting dwindling fish stocks. It’s a brisk business as demand for sustainably caught seafood and around-the-clock monitoring has exploded from the Gulf of Alaska to the Straits of Florida.

    But taking the technology overseas, where the vast majority of seafood consumed in the U.S. is caught, is a steep challenge. Only a few countries can match the U.S.′ strict regulatory oversight. And China — the world’s biggest seafood supplier with an ignominious record of illegal fishing — appears unlikely to embrace the fishing equivalent of a police bodycam.

    The result, scientists fear, could be that well-intended initiatives to replenish fish stocks and reduce unintentional bycatch of threatened species like sharks and sea turtles could backfire: By adding to the regulatory burdens already faced by America’s skippers, more fishing could be transferred overseas and further out of view of conservationists and consumers.

    ———

    This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ———

    “The challenge now is getting the political will,” said Jamie Gibbon, an environmental scientist at The Pew Charitable Trusts who is leading its efforts to promote electronic monitoring internationally. “We are getting close to the point where the technology is reliable enough that countries are going to have to show whether they are committed or not to transparency and responsible fisheries management.”

    To many advocates, electronic monitoring is something of a silver bullet.

    Since 1970, the world’s fish population has plummeted, to the point that today 35% of commercial stocks are overfished. Meanwhile, an estimated 11% of U.S. seafood imports come from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.

    To sustainably manage what’s left, scientists need reliable data on the activities of the tens of thousands of fishing vessels that ply the oceans every day, the vast majority with little supervision.

    Traditional tools like captain’s logbooks and dockside inspections provide limited information. Meanwhile, independent observers — a linchpin in the fight against illegal fishing — are scarce: barely 2,000 globally. In the U.S., the number of trained people willing to take underpaid jobs involving long stretches at sea in an often-dangerous fishing industry has been unable to keep pace with ever-growing demand for bait-to-plate traceability.

    Even when observers are on deck, the data they collect is sometimes skewed.

    A recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that when an observer was on deck New England skippers changed their behavior in subtle but important ways that degraded the quality of fisheries data, a phenomenon known as “observer bias.”

    “The fact is human observers are annoying,” Hager said. “Nobody wants them there, and when they aren’t being threatened or bribed, the data they provide is deeply flawed because it’s a proven fact that fishermen behave differently when they’re being watched.”

    Enter electronic monitoring. For as little as $10,000, vessels can be equipped with high-resolution cameras, sensors and other technology capable of providing a safe, reliable look at what was once a giant blind spot. Some setups allow the video to be transmitted by satellite or cellular data back to shore in real time — delivering the sort of transparency that was previously unthinkable.

    “This isn’t your grandfather’s fishery anymore,” said Captain Al Cottone, who recently had cameras installed on his 45-foot groundfish trawler, the Sabrina Maria. “If you’re going to sail, you just turn the cameras on and you go.”

    Despite such advantages, video monitoring has been slow to catch on since its debut in the late 1990s as a pilot program to stop crab overfishing off British Columbia. Only about 1,500 of the world’s 400,000 industrial fishing vessels have installed such monitoring systems. About 600 of those vessels are in the U.S., which has been driving innovation in the field.

    “We’re still in the infancy stages,” said Brett Alger, an official at NOAA charged with rolling out electronic monitoring in the U.S.

    The stakes are especially high in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean — home to the world’s largest tuna fishery. Observer coverage of the Pacific’s longline fleet, which numbers around 100,000 boats, is around 2% — well below the 20% minimum threshold scientists say they need to assess a fish stock’s health. Also, observer coverage has been suspended altogether in the vast region since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the roughly 1 billion hooks placed in the water each year has barely ebbed.

    “Right now we’re flying blind,” said Mark Zimring, an environmental scientist for The Nature Conservancy focused on spreading video monitoring to large-scale fisheries around the world. “We don’t even have the basic science to get the rules of the game right.”

    The lack of internationally-accepted protocols and technical standards has slowed progress for video monitoring, as have the high costs associated with reviewing abundant amounts of footage on shore. Hager says some of those costs will fall as machine learning and artificial intelligence — technology his company is experimenting with — ease the burden on analysts who have to sit through hours of repetitive video.

    Market pressure may also spur faster adoption. Recently, Bangkok-based Thai Union, owner of the Red Lobster restaurants and Chicken of the Sea tuna brand, committed to having 100% “on-the-water” monitoring of its vast tuna supply chain by 2025. Most of that is to come from electronic monitoring.

    But by far the biggest obstacle to a faster rollout internationally is the lack of political will.

    That’s most dramatic on the high seas, the traditionally lawless waters that compromise nearly half the planet. There, the task of managing the public’s resources is left to inter-governmental organizations where decisions are taken based on consensus, so that objections from any single country are tantamount to a veto.

    Of the 13 regional fisheries management organizations in the world, only six require on-board monitoring — observers or cameras — to enforce rules on gear usage, unintentional catches and quotas, according to a 2019 study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which advises nations on economic policy.

    Among the worst offenders is China. Despite boasting the world’s largest fishing fleet, with at least 3,000 industrial-sized vessels operating internationally, and tens of thousands closer to home, China has fewer than 100 observers. Electronic monitoring consists of just a few pilot programs.

    Unlike in the U.S., where on-water monitoring is used to prepare stock assessments that drive policy, fisheries management in China is more primitive and enforcement of the rules spotty at best.

    Last year, China deployed just two scientists to monitor a few hundred vessels that spent months fishing for squid near the Galapagos Islands. At the same time, it has blocked a widely backed proposal at the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization to boost observer requirements

    “If they want to do something they definitely can,” said Yong Chen, a fisheries scientist whose lab at Stony Brook University in New York hosts regular exchanges with China. “It’s just a question of priorities.”

    Hazards faced by observers are highest outside U.S. waters, where electronic monitoring is used the least. Sixteen observers have died around the world since 2010, according to the U.S.-based Association for Professional Observers.

    Many of the deaths involve observers from impoverished South Pacific islands working for low pay and with little training and support — even when placed on American-flagged vessels that are subject to federal safety regulations. Such working conditions expose observers to bribery and threats by unscrupulous captains who themselves are under pressure to make every voyage count.

    “It’s in our best interest to have really professional data collection, a safe environment and lots of support from the (U.S.) government,” said Teresa Turk, a former observer who was part of a team of outside experts that in 2017 carried out a comprehensive safety review for NOAA in the aftermath of several observer fatalities.

    Back in the U.S., those who make their living from commercial fishing still view cameras warily as something of a double-edged sword.

    Just ask Scott Taylor.

    His Day Boat Seafood in 2011 became one of the first longline companies in the world to carry an ecolabel from the Marine Stewardship Council — the industry’s gold standard. As part of that sustainability drive, the Fort Pierce, Florida, company blazed a trail for video monitoring that spread throughout the U.S.’ Atlantic tuna fleet.

    “I really believed in it. I thought it was a game changer,” he said.

    But his enthusiasm turned when NOAA used the videos to bring civil charges against him last year for what he says was an accidental case of illegal fishing.

    The bust stems from trips made by four tuna boats managed by Day Boat to a tiny fishing hole bound on all sides by the Bahamas’ exclusive economic zone and a U.S. conservation area off limits to commercial fishing. Evidence reviewed by the AP show that Taylor’s boats were fishing legally inside U.S. waters when they dropped their hooks. But hours later some of the gear, carried by hard-to-predict underwater eddies, drifted a few miles over an invisible line into Bahamian waters.

    Geolocated video footage was essential to proving the government’s case, showing how the boats pulled up 48 fish — swordfish, tuna and mahi mahi — while retrieving their gear in Bahamian waters.

    As a result, NOAA levied a whopping $300,000 fine that almost bankrupted Taylor’s business and has had a chilling effect up and down the East Coast’s tuna fleet.

    When electronic monitoring was getting started a decade ago, it appealed to fishermen who thought that the more reliable data might help the government reopen coastal areas closed to commercial fishing since the 1980s, when the fleet was five times larger. Articles on NOAA’s website promised the technology would be used to monitor tuna stocks with greater precision, not play Big Brother.

    “They had everyone snowballed,” said Martin Scanlon, a New York-based skipper who heads the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association, which represents the fleet of around 90 longline vessels. “Never once did they mention it would be used as a compliance tool.”

    Meanwhile, for Taylor, his two-year fight with the federal government has cost him dearly. He’s had to lay off workers, lease out boats and can no longer afford the licensing fee for the ecolabel he worked so hard to get. Most painful of all, he’s abandoned his dream of one day passing the fishing business on to his children.

    “The technology today is incredibly effective,” Taylor said. “But until foreign competitors are held to the same high standards, the only impact from all this invasiveness will be to put the American commercial fishermen out of business.”

    ———

    AP Writer Caleb Jones in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Fu Ting in Washington contributed to this report.

    ———

    Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org. Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman

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  • Could trawler cams help save world’s dwindling fish stocks?

    Could trawler cams help save world’s dwindling fish stocks?

    [ad_1]

    PORTLAND, Maine — For years, Mark Hager’s job as an observer aboard New England fishing boats made him a marked man, seen as a meddling cop on the ocean, counting and scrutinizing every cod, haddock and flounder to help set crucial quotas.

    On one particularly perilous voyage, he was met on the dock at 4 a.m. by a hostile captain cleaning his AK-47 assault rifle. And for the next 12 days at sea, no crew member even uttered a single word to him.

    Now Hager is working to replace such federally-mandated observers with high-definition cameras affixed to fishing boat masts. From the safety of his office, Hager uses a laptop to watch hours of footage of crew members hauling the day’s catch aboard and measuring it with long sticks marked with thick black lines. And he’s able to zoom in on every fish to verify its size and species, noting whether it is kept or flung overboard in accordance with the law.

    “Once you’ve seen hundreds of thousands of pounds of these species it becomes second nature,” said Hager as he toggled from one fish to another.

    Hager’s Maine-based start-up, New England Maritime Monitoring, is one of a bevy of companies seeking to help commercial vessels comply with new U.S. mandates aimed at protecting dwindling fish stocks. It’s a brisk business as demand for sustainably caught seafood and around-the-clock monitoring has exploded from the Gulf of Alaska to the Straits of Florida.

    But taking the technology overseas, where the vast majority of seafood consumed in the U.S. is caught, is a steep challenge. Only a few countries can match the U.S.′ strict regulatory oversight. And China — the world’s biggest seafood supplier with an ignominious record of illegal fishing — appears unlikely to embrace the fishing equivalent of a police bodycam.

    The result, scientists fear, could be that well-intended initiatives to replenish fish stocks and reduce bycatch of threatened species like sharks and sea turtles could backfire: By adding to the regulatory burdens already faced by America’s skippers, more fishing could be transferred overseas and further out of view of conservationists and consumers.

    ———

    This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ———

    “The challenge now is getting the political will,” said Jamie Gibbon, an environmental scientist at The Pew Charitable Trusts who is leading its efforts to promote electronic monitoring internationally. “We are getting close to the point where the technology is reliable enough that countries are going to have to show whether they are committed or not to transparency and responsible fisheries management.”

    To many advocates, electronic monitoring is something of a silver bullet.

    Since 1970, the world’s fish population has plummeted, to the point that today 35% of commercial stocks are overfished. Meanwhile, an estimated 11% of U.S. seafood imports come from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission.

    To sustainably manage what’s left, scientists need reliable data on the activities of the tens of thousands of fishing vessels that ply the oceans every day, the vast majority with little supervision.

    Traditional tools like captain’s logbooks and dockside inspections provide limited information. Meanwhile, independent observers — a linchpin in the fight against illegal fishing — are scarce: barely 2,000 globally. In the U.S., the number of trained people willing to take underpaid jobs involving long stretches at sea in an often-dangerous fishing industry has been unable to keep pace with ever-growing demand for bait-to-plate traceability.

    Even when observers are on deck, the data they collect is sometimes skewed.

    A recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that when an observer was on deck New England skippers changed their behavior in subtle but important ways that degraded the quality of fisheries data, a phenomenon known as “observer bias.”

    “The fact is human observers are annoying,” Hager said. “Nobody wants them there, and when they aren’t being threatened or bribed, the data they provide is deeply flawed because it’s a proven fact that fishermen behave differently when they’re being watched.”

    Enter electronic monitoring. For as little as $10,000, vessels can be equipped with high-resolution cameras, sensors and other technology capable of providing a safe, reliable look at what was once a giant blind spot. Some setups allow the video to be transmitted by satellite or cellular data back to shore in real time — delivering the sort of transparency that was previously unthinkable.

    “This isn’t your grandfather’s fishery anymore,” said Captain Al Cottone, who recently had cameras installed on his 45-foot groundfish trawler, the Sabrina Maria. “If you’re going to sail, you just turn the cameras on and you go.”

    Despite such advantages, video monitoring has been slow to catch on since its debut in the late 1990s as a pilot program to stop crab overfishing off British Columbia. Only about 1,500 of the world’s 400,000 industrial fishing vessels have installed such monitoring systems. About 600 of those vessels are in the U.S., which has been driving innovation in the field.

    “We’re still in the infancy stages,” said Brett Alger, an official at NOAA charged with rolling out electronic monitoring in the U.S.

    The stakes are especially high in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean — home to the world’s largest tuna fishery. Observer coverage of the Pacific’s longline fleet, which numbers around 100,000 boats, is around 2% — well below the 20% minimum threshold scientists say they need to assess a fish stock’s health. Also, observer coverage has been suspended altogether in the vast region since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the roughly 1 billion hooks placed in the water each year has barely ebbed.

    “Right now we’re flying blind,” said Mark Zimring, an environmental scientist for The Nature Conservancy focused on spreading video monitoring to large-scale fisheries around the world. “We don’t even have the basic science to get the rules of the game right.”

    The lack of internationally-accepted protocols and technical standards has slowed progress for video monitoring, as have the high costs associated with reviewing abundant amounts of footage on shore. Hager says some of those costs will fall as machine learning and artificial intelligence — technology his company is experimenting with — ease the burden on analysts who have to sit through hours of repetitive video.

    Market pressure may also spur faster adoption. Recently, Bangkok-based Thai Union, owner of the Red Lobster restaurants and Chicken of the Sea tuna brand, committed to having 100% “on-the-water” monitoring of its vast tuna supply chain by 2025. Most of that is to come from electronic monitoring.

    But by far the biggest obstacle to a faster rollout internationally is the lack of political will.

    That’s most dramatic on the high seas, the traditionally lawless waters that compromise nearly half the planet. There, the task of managing the public’s resources is left to inter-governmental organizations where decisions are taken based on consensus, so that objections from any single country are tantamount to a veto.

    Of the 13 regional fisheries management organizations in the world, only six require on-board monitoring — observers or cameras — to enforce rules on gear usage, bycatch and quotas, according to a 2019 study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which advises nations on economic policy.

    Among the worst offenders is China. Despite boasting the world’s largest fishing fleet, with at least 3,000 industrial-sized vessels operating internationally, and tens of thousands closer to home, China has fewer than 100 observers. Electronic monitoring consists of just a few pilot programs.

    Unlike in the U.S., where on-water monitoring is used to prepare stock assessments that drive policy, fisheries management in China is more primitive and enforcement of the rules spotty at best.

    Last year, China deployed just two scientists to monitor a few hundred vessels that spent months fishing for squid near the Galapagos Islands. At the same time, it has blocked a widely backed proposal at the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization to boost observer requirements

    “If they want to do something they definitely can,” said Yong Chen, a fisheries scientist whose lab at Stony Brook University in New York hosts regular exchanges with China. “It’s just a question of priorities.”

    Hazards faced by observers are highest outside U.S. waters, where electronic monitoring is used the least. Sixteen observers have died around the world since 2010, according to the U.S.-based Association for Professional Observers.

    Many of the deaths involve observers from impoverished South Pacific islands working for low pay and with little training and support — even when placed on American-flagged vessels that are subject to federal safety regulations. Such working conditions expose observers to bribery and threats by unscrupulous captains who themselves are under pressure to make every voyage count.

    “It’s in our best interest to have really professional data collection, a safe environment and lots of support from the (U.S.) government,” said Teresa Turk, a former observer who was part of a team of outside experts that in 2017 carried out a comprehensive safety review for NOAA in the aftermath of several observer fatalities.

    Back in the U.S., those who make their living from commercial fishing still view cameras warily as something of a double-edged sword.

    Just ask Scott Taylor.

    His Day Boat Seafood in 2011 became one of the first longline companies in the world to carry an ecolabel from the Marine Stewardship Council — the industry’s gold standard. As part of that sustainability drive, the Fort Pierce, Florida, company blazed a trail for video monitoring that spread throughout the U.S.’ Atlantic tuna fleet.

    “I really believed in it. I thought it was a game changer,” he said.

    But his enthusiasm turned when NOAA used the videos to bring civil charges against him last year for what he says was an accidental case of illegal fishing.

    The bust stems from trips made by four tuna boats managed by Day Boat to a tiny fishing hole bound on all sides by the Bahamas’ exclusive economic zone and a U.S. conservation area off limits to commercial fishing. Evidence reviewed by the AP show that Taylor’s boats were fishing legally inside U.S. waters when they dropped their hooks. But hours later some of the gear, carried by hard-to-predict underwater eddies, drifted a few miles over an invisible line into Bahamian waters.

    Geolocated video footage was essential to proving the government’s case, showing how the boats pulled up 48 fish — swordfish, tuna and mahi mahi — while retrieving their gear in Bahamian waters.

    As a result, NOAA levied a whopping $300,000 fine that almost bankrupted Taylor’s business and has had a chilling effect up and down the East Coast’s tuna fleet.

    When electronic monitoring was getting started a decade ago, it appealed to fishermen who thought that the more reliable data might help the government reopen coastal areas closed to commercial fishing since the 1980s, when the fleet was five times larger. Articles on NOAA’s website promised the technology would be used to monitor tuna stocks with greater precision, not play Big Brother.

    “They had everyone snowballed,” said Martin Scanlon, a New York-based skipper who heads the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association, which represents the fleet of around 90 longline vessels. “Never once did they mention it would be used as a compliance tool.”

    Meanwhile, for Taylor, his two-year fight with the federal government has cost him dearly. He’s had to lay off workers, lease out boats and can no longer afford the licensing fee for the ecolabel he worked so hard to get. Most painful of all, he’s abandoned his dream of one day passing the fishing business on to his children.

    “The technology today is incredibly effective,” Taylor said. “But until foreign competitors are held to the same high standards, the only impact from all this invasiveness will be to put the American commercial fishermen out of business.”

    ———

    AP Writer Caleb Jones in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Fu Ting in Washington contributed to this report.

    ———

    Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org. Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman

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  • Extinctions, shrinking habitat spur ‘rewilding’ in cities

    Extinctions, shrinking habitat spur ‘rewilding’ in cities

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    DETROIT — In a bustling metro area of 4.3 million people, Yale University wildlife biologist Nyeema Harris ventures into isolated thickets to study Detroit’s most elusive residents — coyotes, foxes, raccoons and skunks among them.

    Harris and colleagues have placed trail cameras in woodsy sections of 25 city parks for the past five years. They’ve recorded thousands of images of animals that emerge mostly at night to roam and forage, revealing a wild side many locals might not know exists.

    “We’re getting more and more exposure to wildlife in urban environments,” Harris said recently while checking several of the devices fastened to trees with steel cables near the ground. “As we’re changing their habitats, as we’re expanding the footprint of urbanization, … we’ll increasingly come in contact with them.”

    Animal and plant species are dying off at an alarming rate, with up to 1 million threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations report. Their plight is stirring calls for “rewilding” places where they thrived until driven out by development, pollution and climate change.

    Rewilding generally means reviving natural systems in degraded locations — sometimes with a helping hand. That might mean removing dams, building tunnels to reconnect migration pathways severed by roads, or reintroducing predators such as wolves to help balance ecosystems. But after initial assists, there’s little human involvement.

    The idea might seem best suited to remote areas where nature is freer to heal without interference. But rewilding also happens in some of the world’s biggest urban centers, as people find mutually beneficial ways to coexist with nature.

    The U.S. Forest Service estimates 6,000 acres (2,428 hectares) of open space are lost daily as cities and suburbs expand. More than two-thirds of the global population will live in urban areas by 2050, the U.N. says.

    “Climate change is coming, and we are facing an equally important biodiversity crisis,” said Nathalie Pettorelli, senior scientist with the Zoological Society of London. “There’s no better place to engage people on these matters than in cities.”

    In a September report, the society noted rewilding in metropolises such as Singapore, where a 1.7-mile (2.7-kilometer) stretch of the Kallang River has been converted from a concrete-lined channel into a twisting waterway lined with plants, rocks and other natural materials and flanked by green parkland.

    Treating urban rivers like natural waters instead of drainage ditches can boost fish passage and let adjacent lands absorb floodwaters as global warming brings more extreme weather, the report says.

    The German cities of Hannover, Frankfurt and Dessau-Rosslau designated vacant lots, parks, lawns and urban waterways where nature could take its course. As native wildflowers have sprung up, they’ve attracted birds, butterflies, bees, even hedgehogs.

    London Mayor Sadiq Khan, describing the United Kingdom as “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,” announced a plan last year to fund 45 urban rewilding projects to improve habitat for stag beetles, water voles and birds such as swifts and sparrows.

    In the north London borough of Enfield, two beavers were released in March — 400 years after the species was hunted to extinction in Great Britain — in the hope their dams would prevent flash flooding. One died but was to be replaced.

    Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium and the nonprofit Urban Rivers are installing “floating wetlands” on part of the Chicago River to provide fish breeding areas, bird and pollinator habitat and root systems that cleanse polluted water.

    Urban rewilding can’t return landscapes to pre-settlement times and doesn’t try, said Marie Law Adams, a Northeastern University associate professor of architecture.

    Instead, the aim is to encourage natural processes that serve people and wildlife by increasing tree cover to ease summer heat, storing carbon and hosting more animals. Or installing surface channels called bio-swales that filter rainwater runoff from parking lots instead of letting it contaminate creeks.

    “We need to learn from the mistakes of the mid-20th century — paving over everything, engineering everything with gray infrastructure” such as dams and pipes, Adams said.

    Detroit’s sprawling metro area illustrates how human actions can boost rewilding, intentionally or not.

    Hundreds of thousands of houses and other structures were abandoned as the struggling city’s population fell more than 60% since peaking at 1.8 million in the 1950s. Many were razed, leaving vacant tracts that plants and animals have occupied. Nonprofit groups have planted trees, community gardens and pollinator-friendly shrubs.

    Conservation projects reintroduced ospreys and peregrine falcons. Bald eagles found their way back as bans on DDT and other pesticides helped expand their range nationwide. Anti-pollution laws and government-funded cleanups made nearby rivers more hospitable to sturgeon, whitefish, beavers and native plants, such as wild celery.

    “Detroit is a stellar example of urban rewilding, ” said John Hartig, a lake scientist at the nearby University of Windsor and former head of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge. “It’s been more organic than strategic. We created the conditions, things got better environmentally, and the native species came back.”

    The refuge, a half-hour’s drive from downtown, consists of 30 parcels totaling 6,200 acres (2,509 hectares), including islands, wetlands and former industrial sites. It’s home to 300 bird species and a busy stopover for ducks, raptors and others during migration, said Manager Dan Kennedy.

    To Harris, the Yale biologist formerly with the University of Michigan, Detroit offers a unique backdrop for studying wildlife in urban settings.

    Unlike most big cities, its human population is declining, even as its streets, buildings and other infrastructure remain largely intact. And there’s diverse habitat. It ranges from large lakes and rivers to neighborhoods — some occupied, others largely deserted — and parklands so quiet “you don’t even know you’re in the city,” Harris said while changing camera batteries and jotting notes in a woodsy section of O’Hair Park.

    Her team’s photographic observations have yielded published studies on how mammals react to each other, and to people, in urban landscapes.

    The project connects them with local residents, some intrigued by coyotes and raccoons in the neighborhood, others fearful of diseases or harm to pets.

    It’s an educational opportunity, Harris said — about proper trash disposal, resisting the temptation to feed wild animals and the value of healthy, diverse ecosystems.

    “It used to be that you had to go to some remote location to get exposure to nature,” said Harris, a Philadelphia native who was excited as a child to glimpse an occasional squirrel or deer. “Now that’s not the case. Like it or not, rewilding will occur. The question is, how can we prepare communities and environments and societies to anticipate the presence of more and more wildlife?”

    Rewilding can be a tough sell for urbanites who prefer well-manicured lawns and think ecologically rich systems look weedy and unkempt or should be used for housing.

    But advocates say it isn’t just about animals and plants. Studies show time in natural spaces improves people’s physical and mental health.

    “A lot of city people have lost their tolerance to live with wildlife,” said Pettorelli of Zoological Society of London. “There’s a lot of reteaching ourselves to be done. To really make a difference in tackling the biodiversity crisis, you’re going to have to have people on board.”

    ——————

    Follow John Flesher on Twitter: @JohnFlesher

    ——————

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Scientists call for action to help sunflower sea stars

    Scientists call for action to help sunflower sea stars

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    ASTORIA, Ore. — Scientists along the West Coast are calling for action to help sunflower sea stars, among the largest sea stars in the world, recover from catastrophic population declines.

    Experts say a sea star wasting disease epidemic that began in 2013 has decimated about 95% of the population from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, The Astorian reported.

    The decline triggered the International Union for Conservation of Nature to classify the species as critically endangered in 2020. A petition to list the species under the federal Endangered Species Act was filed in 2021.

    Steven Rumrill, shellfish program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in his more than 40 years as a marine scientist, he hasn’t seen a widespread decline of a species on the same scale as the sunflower sea star.

    The sea stars, which are among the largest in the world and can span more than 3 feet (91 centimeters), are predators to the kelp-eating sea urchin. Without them, sea urchin populations have exploded, causing a troubling decline in kelp forests that provide food and shelter to many aquatic species along the West Coast.

    Rumrill contributed to a recently published roadmap to recovery for the sea star as a guide for scientists and conservationists.

    “It just sort of breaks your heart to see a species decline so rapidly to the point of extinction,” Rumrill said. “At the global scale, we’re recognizing that the impacts of humans have had major impacts on populations and lots of extinctions worldwide. Here’s one that’s happening right in front of our eyes.”

    The roadmap was completed in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, National Marine Fisheries Service, and state agencies in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

    The sea star wasting disease is estimated to have killed over 5.75 billion sunflower sea stars, according to the document.

    The source of the outbreak has not been conclusively identified, but the document points to evidence that warming ocean waters from human-caused climate change increases the severity of the disease and could have triggered the outbreak.

    Rumrill said listing through the Endangered Species Act could result in federal funding to continue research.

    Matthew Burks, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said whether the agency recommends the sea star be listed under the Endangered Species Act will be posted to the Federal Register by early next year.

    While sunflower sea stars appear to be the most affected by the sea star wasting disease, they are among about 20 documented species of sea stars at risk along the West Coast.

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  • Los Angeles City Council votes to ban oil and gas drilling

    Los Angeles City Council votes to ban oil and gas drilling

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    The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously on Friday to ban drilling of new oil and gas wells and phase out existing ones over the next 20 years.

    The vote comes after more than a decade of complaints from city residents that pollution drifting from wells was affecting their health. Los Angeles was once a booming oil town, but many of its oilfields are now played out.

    “Hundreds of thousands of Angelenos have had to raise their kids, go to work, prepare their meals (and) go to neighborhood parks in the shadows of oil and gas production,” said Los Angeles City Council president Paul Krekorian, one of the councilmembers who introduced this measure. “The time has come …. when we end oil and gas production in the city of Los Angeles.”

    Two engineers with Yorke Engineering, a California-based company that does air quality and environmental compliance review, spoke in opposition to the ordinance. They said a ban and phase out will have a negative effect because oil and gas operators will abandon wells. They said this is being underestimated by the city. If they walk away, that will mean increased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, they said.

    But Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said these claims are “not credible,” citing a review by Impact Sciences, another California-based firm that performed an environmental analysis of the ordinance for the city.

    A document prepared by the Los Angeles city controller’s office in 2018 said there were 780 active and 287 idle wells within city boundaries. An idle well is one that is not operating, but neither has it been permanently sealed, so it could be brought back into production.

    Many more well lie just outside the city limits, in Carson, Inglewood and Long Beach. Long Beach is the home of a good part of the extremely prolific Wilmington oil field, which yielded more than 10 million barrels of crude oil in 2019, according to state records.

    There is research on the possible effect of pollution emanating from some of the city’s existing oil and gas wells.

    Researchers from the University of Southern California found in a study in 2021 that people living near wells in two Los Angeles neighborhoods — University Park and Jefferson Park — reported significantly higher rates of wheezing, eye and nose irritation, sore throat and dizziness than neighbors living farther away. Both of those communities are predominantly non-white with large Black and Latino communities, according to the U.S. Census.

    The push to ban drilling in the City of Los Angeles is part of a region-wide effort to shut down oil and gas extraction through the County of Los Angeles, with similar measures covering Culver City and unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County passed in 2021.

    “In Los Angeles, we sit on the largest urban oil deposit in the world,” said councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson ahead of the vote. “So if Los Angeles can do it, cities around the world can do it.”

    ———

    Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

    ———

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Official: Toxic fire suppressant spill in Hawaii ‘egregious’

    Official: Toxic fire suppressant spill in Hawaii ‘egregious’

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    A cleanup is underway after about 1,100 gallons of toxic fire suppressant was spilled at the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility Tuesday, according to Hawaii Department of Health officials

    HONOLULU — A clean up is underway after about 1,100 gallons of toxic fire suppressant was spilled at the Navy’s Red Hill fuel facility Tuesday, according to Hawaii Department of Health officials.

    The Honolulu-Star Advertiser reported that the Aqueous Film Forming Foam is used to suppress fires caused by flammable liquids such as fuel and contain PFAS, so-called “forever chemicals” that are slow to degrade when released into the environment. Health investigators said excavators are currently digging up contaminated soil. No surface water was contaminated.

    According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, PFAS may lead to a higher risk of kidney and testicular cancer, increased risk of high blood pressure in pregnant women, among other health problems.

    “This is egregious,” Kathleen Ho, DOH’s deputy director of environmental health said in a news release. “AFFF contains PFAS forever chemicals — groundwater contamination could be devastating to our aquifer. While details are limited at this time, the Joint Task Force and Navy need to be transparent about how this happened.”

    Ho said that regulators “will hold the Department of Defense accountable and will press the operator to take any and all appropriate corrective action throughout the defueling and decommissioning process.”

    The release occurred above Adit 6, a passageway at the mauka end of the Red Hill facility, according to DOH, which said it was notified of the leak at about 3 p.m.

    “A DOH on-scene coordinator responded and preliminarily reported that the spill was not contained and AFFF has spilled into soil outside of the Red Hill facility and into the facility near Adit 6,” DOH said in a news release.

    No details were provided about the cause of the release, health officials said.

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  • Gas driller pleads no contest to polluting town’s water

    Gas driller pleads no contest to polluting town’s water

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    MONTROSE, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s most active gas driller pleaded no contest Tuesday to criminal charges, capping a landmark environmental case against a company that prosecutors say polluted a rural community’s drinking water 14 years ago and then tried to evade responsibility.

    Residents of the tiny crossroads of Dimock in northeastern Pennsylvania say they have gone more than a decade without a clean, reliable source of drinking water after their aquifer was ruined by Houston-based Coterra Energy Inc.

    Under a plea deal entered in Susquehanna County Court, Coterra agreed to pay $16.29 million to fund construction of a new public water system and pay the impacted residents’ water bills for the next 75 years.

    “After more than decade of denials, of shirking responsibility and accountability, Coterra pleaded to their crime, and the people of Dimock finally had their day in court,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the state’s incoming governor, said outside the courtroom. “Today is further proof that you don’t get to just walk away from the harm you do here in Pennsylvania.”

    The plea — the result of years of negotiations between Coterra and the attorney general’s office — represents a milestone in one of the most prominent pollution cases ever to emerge from the U.S. drilling and fracking boom. Dimock drew national notoriety after residents were filmed lighting their tap water on fire in the Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary “Gasland.”

    Coterra’s corporate predecessor, Cabot Oil & Gas Corp., was charged in June 2020 with 15 criminal counts, most of them felonies, after a grand jury investigation found the company drilled faulty gas wells that leaked flammable methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.

    The grand jury blasted what it called Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”

    Cabot, which merged with Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. to form Coterra, has long maintained the gas in residents’ water was naturally occurring.

    Coterra pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of prohibition against discharge of industrial wastes under the state’s Clean Streams Law. The plea means Coterra does not admit guilt but agreed to accept criminal responsibility.

    “Coterra has worked closely with the Office of Attorney General to resolve historical matters and create a path forward for all parties,” company spokesperson George Stark said via email. He said Coterra ”strives to follow best practices, exceed industry standards, and to continue to be a valuable community partner.”

    Many residents have avoided using their well water since the aquifer was contaminated with methane and heavy metals, using bottled water, bulk water purchased commercially, and even water drawn from creeks and artesian wells instead.

    “These people had to find very creative ways to get water for their homes, water for their families, their kids, their critters, and it was not pretty,” Dimock resident Victoria Switzer said Tuesday. “It was just crazy, people trying to find water.”

    Switzer, whose house will be connected to the new water line, called it “wonderful news” — and a long time coming.

    Another resident, Scott Ely, said some of his neighbors had moved away or developed health problems as a result of Coterra’s practices, while his own children, now in college, had grown up “without a safe water source.”

    “There’s so much heartache,” he said.

    Residents were informed of the plea deal last week. A public utility, Pennsylvania American Water, plans to drill two wells — what it calls a “public groundwater system” — and build a treatment plant that will remove any contaminants from the water before piping it to about 20 homes in Dimock. The utility estimates that construction will take about three years, during which Coterra will be required to provide individual treatment systems and bottled water to impacted residents.

    The settlement comes near the end of Shapiro’s tenure as attorney general.

    On Tuesday, Shapiro, a Democrat who will be sworn in as governor in January, pledged more aggressive regulatory oversight of the industry.

    “We have to change our regulatory structure here in the commonwealth,” Shapiro said. “We have to make sure we are setting clear rules of the road and holding industry accountable. If the regulators fail to do that, then industry is not going to be constrained and they’re going to go ahead and put profits before people. And that’s where the danger comes in.”

    Shapiro demurred on the question of whether Coterra would be permitted to resume drilling in a 9-square-mile (23-square-kilometer) area of Dimock where it has long been banned. Shpairo said he would review the matter with his new environmental secretary after taking office as governor.

    The criminal case has not slowed Coterra’s business. It is the leading shale gas driller in the nation’s No. 2 natural gas-producing state.

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  • Justice Department intervenes for struggling water system

    Justice Department intervenes for struggling water system

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    JACKSON, Miss. — The Justice Department made a rare intervention Tuesday to try to bring improvements in the beleaguered water system in Mississippi’s capital city, which nearly collapsed in late summer and continues to struggle.

    The department filed a proposal to appoint a third-party manager for the Jackson water system. That is meant to be an interim step while the federal government, the city of Jackson and the Mississippi State Department of Health try to negotiate a court-enforced consent decree, the department said in a news release. The goal is to achieve long-term sustainability of the system and the city’s compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act and other laws.

    The city and the state health department have signed the proposal, which needs approval of a federal judge.

    The Justice Department on Tuesday also filed a complaint on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency against Jackson, alleging that the city has failed to provide drinking water that is reliably compliant with the Safe Drinking Water Act. According to the agreement, that litigation will be put on hold six months while all parties try to improve the water system.

    Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in the news release that the Justice Department is “taking action in federal court to address long-standing failures in the city of Jackson’s public drinking water system.”

    “The Department of Justice takes seriously its responsibility to keep the American people safe and to protect their civil rights,” Garland said. “Together with our partners at EPA, we will continue to seek justice for the residents of Jackson, Mississippi. And we will continue to prioritize cases in the communities most burdened by environmental harm.”

    In a federal complaint Sept. 27, the NAACP said Mississippi officials “all but assured” a drinking water calamity by depriving Jackson of badly needed funds to upgrade its infrastructure.

    The EPA announced in late October that it was investigating whether Mississippi state agencies have discriminated against Jackson by refusing to fund water system improvements in the city of 150,000, where more than 80% of residents are Black and about a quarter of the population lives in poverty.

    Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said Tuesday that the Jackson water problems were caused by a “crisis of incompetence” in the Democratic-led city.

    “It is excellent news for anyone who cares about the people of Jackson that the mayor will no longer be overseeing the city’s water system,” Reeves said.

    Like many American cities, Jackson struggles with aging infrastructure with water lines that crack or collapse. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat in the Republican-led state, said the city’s water problems come from decades of deferred maintenance.

    Jackson frequently has boil-water notices because of loss of pressure or other problems that can contaminate the water. Some of the mandates are in place for only a few days, while others last weeks. Some only affect specific neighborhoods, usually because of broken pipes in the area. Others affect all customers on the water system.

    Edward “Ted” Henifin was appointed Tuesday as interim third-party manager of the Jackson water system and Water Sewer Business Administration, the city’s water billing department. An online profile of Henifin says he is a registered professional engineer who served 15 years as general manager of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia. Before that, he served as director of public works for the city of Hampton, Virginia.

    The proposal lists 13 projects that Henifin will in charge of implementing. The projects are meant to improve the water system’s near-term stability, according to a news release. Among the most pressing priorities is a winterization project to make the system less vulnerable. A cold snap in 2021 left tens of thousands of people in Jackson without running water after pipes froze.

    EPA Administrator Michael Regan, who has been to Jackson four times in the past year, said the Justice Department’s action “marks a critical moment on the path to securing clean, safe water for Jackson residents,″ adding that he is grateful to Garland for acting quickly on the city’s water crisis.

    In May, the Justice Department created an environmental justice division, following up on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign promise to elevate environmental justice issues in an all-of-government approach. The Justice Department said in July that it was investigating illegal dumping in Black and Latino neighborhoods in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city.

    Jackson has had water problems for decades. Most of the city lost running water for several days after heavy rainfall exacerbated problems at the city’s main water treatment plant in late August. When that happened, Jackson had already been under a boil-water advisory for a month because health inspectors had found cloudy water that could make people ill.

    The boil-water advisory was lifted in mid-September, but many people remain skeptical about water quality.

    Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the Justice Department announcement Tuesday is “an important and necessary move to ensure that residents of Jackson and surrounding communities have access to safe drinking water — a vital necessity for all communities to thrive.”

    “Unfortunately,” Wade said, “the deplorable and unsafe condition of Jackson’s water system didn’t happen overnight but stems from decades of neglect and the intentional disinvestment of resources for the majority-Black municipality.”

    ————

    Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed from Washington.

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  • Drying California lake to get $250M in US drought funding

    Drying California lake to get $250M in US drought funding

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The federal government said Monday it will spend $250 million over four years on environmental cleanup and restoration work around a drying Southern California lake that’s fed by the depleted Colorado River.

    The future of the Salton Sea, and who is financially responsible for it, has been a key issue in discussions over how to stave off a crisis in the Colorado River. The lake was formed in 1905 when the river overflowed, creating a resort destination that slowly morphed into an environmental disaster as water levels receded, exposing residents to harmful dust and reducing wildlife habitat.

    The lake is largely fed by runoff from farms in California’s Imperial Valley, who use Colorado River water to grow many of the nation’s winter vegetables as well as feed crops like alfalfa. As the farmers reduce their water use, less flows into the lake. California said it would only reduce its reliance on the over-tapped river if the federal government put up money to mitigate the effects of less water flowing into the sea.

    “It’s kind of a linchpin for the action we need to see on the Colorado River,” said Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary. “Finally we are all in agreement that we can’t leave the Salton Sea on the cutting room floor, we can’t take these conservation actions — these extraordinary measures — at the expense of these residents.”

    The deal announced Monday needs approval from the Imperial Irrigation District, the largest user of Colorado River water. The water entity’s board will take it up on Tuesday.

    Both the district’s general manager and board member JB Hamby applauded the deal Monday.

    “The collaboration happening at the Salton Sea between water agencies and state, federal, and tribal governments is a blueprint for effective cooperation that the Colorado River Basin sorely needs,” Hamby said in a statement.

    The $250 million will come out of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, which set aside $4 billion to stave off the worst effects of drought across the U.S. West.

    Most of the money is contingent on the Imperial Irrigation District and Coachella Valley Water District making good on their commitments to reduce their own use of river water. Both submitted proposals to cut back their usage for payment as part of a new federal program.

    The quarter-billion dollars will largely go to bolster and speed up existing state projects designed to lower the negative environmental impact of the drying lake bed. The state has committed nearly $583 million to projects at the sea, including dust suppression and habitat restoration. One project underway aims to create wetlands and ponds that will limit dust from blowing into the air while creating safe spaces for fish and birds, according to the state.

    The deal comes as the U.S. Interior Department and the seven states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming — scramble to stave off the worst impacts of the ongoing drought and historic overuse of the river. Lakes Powell and Mead, the key reservoirs that store river water and provide hydropower across the West, are only about a quarter full.

    After months of failed negotiations over a deal to drastically cut water use, the federal government in October said it would pay farmers and cities to cut back through activities like leaving fields unplanted or lining canals to prevent water from seeping into the ground. Proposals were due earlier this month. Meanwhile, the Interior Department has taken steps to unilaterally revise guidelines that govern when water shortages are declared, a move that could force states to further cut back.

    The Salton Sea, meanwhile, became its own political flashpoint in October when Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, then up for reelection, urged the federal government to withhold any environmental cleanup money unless California agreed to give up more water. That prompted criticism he was using communities who already suffer from poor air quality as a bargaining chip.

    The agreement marks a good step forward but key details still need to be fleshed out, said Frank Ruiz, Salton Sea program director for Audubon California. He worries that $250 million is not enough to mitigate all of the damage already done at the sea.

    “This is a great step but I think we need a lot more,” he said. “We need to continue discussing water sustainability in the region.”

    Broadly, he wants to see a more equitable distribution of the region’s water supplies and hopes the Salton Sea gets a guaranteed minimum amount of water even as overall use declines.

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  • Water boil order issued for more than 2 million in Houston

    Water boil order issued for more than 2 million in Houston

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    HOUSTON — More than 2 million people in the Houston area were under a boil order notice Monday after a power outage caused low pressure at a water purification plant, officials said.

    The order — which means water must be boiled before it’s used for cooking, bathing or drinking — also prompted schools in the Houston area to close Monday. It was issued Sunday after a power outage at a water purification plant, the city’s public works department said.

    Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said on Twitter that the city believes the water is safe but a boil order was required because of the drop in water pressure. He said water sampling would begin Monday morning, and the boil order could be lifted 24 hours after the city is notified the water is safe.

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  • Climate, politics double threat as Tigris-Euphrates shrivels

    Climate, politics double threat as Tigris-Euphrates shrivels

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    DAWWAYAH, Iraq and ILISU DAM, Turkey — Next year, the water will come. The pipes have been laid to Ata Yigit’s sprawling farm in Turkey’s southeast connecting it to a dam on the Euphrates River. A dream, soon to become a reality, he says.

    Over 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) downstream in southern Iraq, nothing grows anymore in Obeid Hafez’s wheat farm. The water stopped coming a year ago, the 95-year-old said.

    The starkly different realities are playing out along the length of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, one of the world’s most vulnerable. River flows have fallen by 40% in the past four decades as countries along its length — Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq — pursue rapid, unilateral development of the waters’ use.

    The drop is projected to worsen as temperatures rise from climate change. Both Turkey and Iraq, the two biggest consumers, acknowledge they must cooperate to preserve the river system. But a combination of political failures, mistrust and intransigence are conspiring to prevent a deal on sharing the rivers.

    The Associated Press conducted more than a dozen interviews in both countries, from top water envoys and senior officials to local farmers, and gained exclusive visits to controversial dam projects. Internal reports and revealed data illustrate the calculations driving disputes behind closed doors, from Iraq’s fears of a potential 20% drop in food production to Turkey’s struggles to balance Iraq’s and its own needs.

    “I don’t see a solution,” said former Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.

    “Would Turkey sacrifice its own interests? Especially if that means that by giving more (water) to us, their farmers and people will suffer?”

    Turkey has been harnessing the river basin with a massive project to boost agriculture and generate hydroelectricity, the Southeast Anatolia Project, or GAP by its Turkish acronym. It has built at least 19 dams on the Euphrates and Tigris, with several more planned for a total of 22. The aim is to develop Turkey’s southeast, long an economic backwater.

    For the farmer, Yigit, the project will be transformative.

    Until now, his reliance on well water only permitted half his lands to be irrigated.

    But now that the irrigation pipes have reached his farm in Mardin province, his entire 4,500 acres will be watered next year via the Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates.

    In contrast, Iraq — which relies on outside sources for nearly all its water — grows more worried with every drop diverted upstream.

    In 2014, its Water Ministry prepared a confidential report warning that in two years, Iraq’s water supply would no longer meet demand, and the gap would keep widening. The report, seen by the AP, said that by 2035, the water deficit would cause a 20% reduction in food production.

    The report shows Iraqi officials knew how bleak the future would be without the recommended $180 billion in investment in water infrastructure and an agreement with its neighbors. Neither has happened.

    Decades of talks have still not found common ground on water-sharing.

    Turkey approaches the water issue as if it were the river basin’s benevolent owner, assessing needs and deciding how much to let flow downstream. Iraq considers ownership shared and wants a more permanent arrangement with defined portions.

    In a rare interview, Turkey’s envoy on water issues with Iraq, Veysel Eroglu, told the AP that Turkey cannot accept to release a fixed amount of water because of the unpredictability of river flows in the age of climate change.

    Eroglu said Turkey could agree to setting a ratio to release — but only if Syria and Iraq provide detailed data on their water consumption.

    “That is the only way to share water in an optimal and fair manner,” Eroglu said.

    Iraq refuses to provide its consumption data. That’s in part because it would show the widespread water waste in Iraq and the government weakness that makes managing water nearly impossible.

    Government attempts at rationing the waning water causes outrage in southern Iraq. In August in southern Dhi Qar province, for example, tribal leader Sheikh Thamer Saeedi and dozens of protesters tried to divert water from a Tigris tributary to feed his barren lands after authorities failed to respond to his pleas for water.

    The attempted diversion nearly sparked violence between local tribes before security forces intervened.

    Iraq blames one Turkish infrastructure project in particular for these woes: the Ilusu Dam, on the Tigris.

    Before Turkey began operating the dam in 2020, all the waters of Tigris flowed into Iraq. Now how much water comes down depends on Ankara’s consideration of Iraq’s month-to-month requests for a minimum flow, weighed against Turkey’s own hydropower needs.

    Turkey contends it is unfairly scapegoated. The AP was given an exclusive tour of the dam facility in October by Turkey’s State Hydraulics Works, known by the Turkish acronym DSI, and given figures for the first time detailing flow rates and electricity production over two years.

    A decade ago, Iraq received an average flow of 625 cubic meters of water per second from the Tigris. Today, the rate averages only 36% of that, Iraqi water ministry officials say.

    Data provided by DSI shows that Turkey respected a request made by Iraq that it release at least 300 cubic meters per second down the Tigris during summer months when shortages are common.

    But Iraqi officials say depending on such ad hoc arrangements make planning difficult.

    “They can cut water, they can release water. We urgently need a water agreement just to satisfy Iraq’s minimum requirements,” said Hatem Hamid, head of the National Centre for Water Resources Management.

    For example, with dire shortages anticipated in 2022, Hamid cut the state agriculture water plan in half and reduced fresh water flows to Iraq’s marshlands, to minimize salinity. But water-stressed Iran also diverted flows from tributaries feeding the marshes. The result was an environmental emergency and hundreds of dead livestock.

    Back in Obeid Hafez’s farm, the land is barren.

    Portraits of Hafez’s forefathers hang in his spartan living room. With his sons gone to seek work in the cities, there will be no one to till the land after him.

    “Life has ended here,” he said.

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  • West Texas earthquake causes damage hundreds of miles away

    West Texas earthquake causes damage hundreds of miles away

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    MENTONE, Texas — A strong earthquake that struck a remote area of the West Texas desert caused damage in San Antonio, hundreds of miles from the epicenter, officials said.

    University Health said Thursday that its Robert B. Green historical building was deemed unsafe because of damage sustained from the quake, which hit Wednesday in a remote area near the New Mexico border. The historical building is more than 100 years old and has been closed off for safety reasons, University Health said.

    The quake initially had a 5.3 magnitude but that was revised upward to 5.4. The earthquake’s epicenter was about 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Mentone, a tiny community about 350 miles (560 kilometers) northwest of San Antonio.

    It was one of the strongest earthquakes on record in Texas and hit in an area known for oil and gas production. On Thursday, the state’s Railroad Commission — which regulates Texas’ oil and gas industry — sent inspectors to the site to determine whether any actions were needed.

    Earthquakes in the south-central United States have been linked to oil and gas production, particularly the underground injection of wastewater. The U.S. Geological Survey said research suggests that a 5.0 magnitude quake that struck the same West Texas area in 2020 was the result of a large increase of wastewater injection in the region.

    In neighboring Oklahoma, thousands of earthquakes of varying magnitudes have been recorded in the past decade, leading state regulators to direct producers to close some injection wells.

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  • 3rd investigation finds no contamination at Missouri school

    3rd investigation finds no contamination at Missouri school

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    FLORISSANT, Mo. — Another round of testing found no harmful radioactive contamination at a Missouri elementary school, leaving school board members to wonder if there really is any risk at the now-shuttered school.

    Jana Elementary School in the St. Louis suburb of Florissant was shut down last month after testing by a private company found contamination on the kindergarten playground and inside the building. The private study was funded by lawyers whose clients are suing over radioactive contamination in Coldwater Creek, which runs near the school.

    The results prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to conduct its own investigation. The agency announced last week that it found no contamination inside the school or in multiple soil samples on the outside.

    The Hazelwood School District then ordered a third round of testing from SCI Engineering. Jessica Keeven of SCI told the school board Tuesday night that the building and grounds do not contain harmful levels of radioactive material, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

    The school opened in 1970 and sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated with radioactive waste generated when Mallinckrodt Chemical processed uranium in the 1940s and 1950s for atomic weapons. The waste was initially stored at Lambert Airport, near the creek, then later trucked to an industrial area that also borders the creek.

    The site near the airport has largely been cleaned up but remediation of the creek itself won’t be finished until 2038, Corps officials have said.

    The contamination finding in a report released in October by Boston Chemical Data Corp. created enough concern that the school board closed the school and moved classes online. Jana students and staff will be moved to other schools after the Thanksgiving break.

    Board members acknowledged that the “conflicting” reports created some confusion about what to do next. Member Kevin Langley said he wasn’t convinced that the health risk for children in the school building is greater than their risk in their homes near Coldwater Creek.

    “What do we do to remediate Jana Elementary School and how do we ever declare it as safe for reuse?” he asked.

    Marco Kaltofen of Boston Chemical told The Associated Press that the findings of all three studies are similar, but that the interpretations are different. While the Corps and SCI believe radioactive material at the school is consistent with what would be naturally occurring, the Boston Chemical evaluation found that proximity to the contaminated creek was responsible for it.

    “Others are hoping that it is all natural, all background,” Kaltofen said. “Unfortunately, hope isn’t science.”

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  • Mississippi capital to hire emergency water plant workers

    Mississippi capital to hire emergency water plant workers

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    JACKSON, Miss — Local officials in Mississippi’s capital city, where a late summer water crisis upended life for 150,00 people, have approved an emergency plan to increase staffing at the city’s two water treatment plants.

    Jackson city council members voted Thursday to hire contract workers from a Los Angeles-based company to staff the O.B. Curtis and J.H. Fewell water treatment plants, tanks and well facilities. Under the agreement, WaterTalent LLC will provide the city with four skilled water operators to help beef up paltry staffing at the two treatment facilities.

    Jackson currently has two operators licensed at the Class A level, who have a degree of technical expertise that can take years to acquire. City leaders said that the two operators have been working more than 80 hours a week to produce clean water at the plants.

    “We’re still relying on the same operators who are working long, long, long hours and long shifts,” said Ted Henifin, a consultant working with the city council. “So, we identified this company, and they recruit these folks and have them on standby, essentially licensed operators, that are willing to deploy for some emergency periods, and we’ve gotten a proposal from them.”

    The workers will be paid around $40 per hour. The agreement will be in place until the city hires a long-term contractor, WLBT-TV reported. The new operators will report to Jackson on Sunday, November 13.

    Jackson’s water system has been beset by problems for decades, but the latest troubles began in late August after heavy rainfall exacerbated problems at the O.B. Curtis plant, leaving many customers without running water. State and federal officials surged resources to the area after emergency orders were declared by Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and President Joe Biden.

    Reeves said the state of emergency he declared on Aug. 30 would remain in place until Nov. 22. City officials are attempting to reach an agreement with a private firm to operate Jackson’s water system over the long term. Until then, extra staffing will ease the burden on city workers, local officials said.

    “The big piece of this is it also allows (operators) not to have to work 70 to 80 hours a week,” Henifin said. “They’re actually going to get some of their life back, which I think they would all like at this point in time.”

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  • California sues over ‘forever chemicals’ that taint water

    California sues over ‘forever chemicals’ that taint water

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    SAN FRANCISCO — A lawsuit filed Thursday by the state of California accuses 3M, Dupont and 16 smaller companies of covering up the harm caused to the environment and the public from chemicals manufactured by the firms that have over decades found their way into waterways and human bloodstreams.

    Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the lawsuit against the manufacturers of compounds that have been used in consumer goods and industry since the 1940s. The chemicals are found in firefighting foams, nonstick frying pans, cleaning sprays, water-repellent sports gear, stain-resistant rugs, cosmetics and countless other products.

    Bonta said these so-called forever chemicals are so strong that they do not degrade or do so only slowly in the environment and remain in a person’s bloodstream indefinitely.

    The companies knew for decades that the chemicals are “toxic and harmful to human health and the environment, yet they continued to produce them for mass use and concealed their harms from the public,” Bonta said.

    He said the court action comes following a multiyear investigation that found the companies marketed products containing PFAS, short for polyfluoroalkyl substances, despite knowing they cause cancer, developmental defects, reduced bone density and other health problems.

    Minnesota-based 3M said in a statement after the court filing that it “acted responsibly in connection with products containing PFAS and will defend its record of environmental stewardship.”

    Dupont, based in Delaware, said the company as it now exists should not have been named in the lawsuit.

    “In 2019, DuPont de Nemours was established as a new multi-industrial specialty products company. DuPont de Nemours has never manufactured PFOA, PFOS or firefighting foam. While we don’t comment on pending litigation, we believe these complaints are without merit, and the latest example of DuPont de Nemours being improperly named in litigation,” the statement said.

    The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County, is the first statewide legal action over PFAS contamination.

    It alleges violations of state consumer protection and environmental statutes and invokes a federal law that establishes a path to recoup the costs of cleaning up hazardous substances in soil and water.

    Bonta estimated penalties and cleanup costs sought by the lawsuit would reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

    U.S. manufacturers have voluntarily phased out compounds such as PFAS, but there are a limited number of ongoing uses and the chemicals remain in the environment because they do not degrade over time.

    The federal Environmental Protection Agency in June invited states and territories to apply for $1 billion under the new bipartisan infrastructure law to address PFAS and other contaminants in drinking water. Money can be used for technical assistance, water quality testing, contractor training and installation of centralized treatment, officials said.

    The EPA warned then that the chemicals are more dangerous than previously thought and pose health risks even at levels so low they cannot currently be detected.

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  • Corps finds no radioactive contamination at Missouri school

    Corps finds no radioactive contamination at Missouri school

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    FLORISSANT, Mo. — Testing by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found no radioactive contamination at a Missouri school that was shut down last month amid fears that nuclear material from a contaminated creek nearby had made its way into the school, Corps officials said Wednesday.

    Teams from the Corps’ St. Louis office began testing the interior of Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri, and the soil around it in late October, days after the school board closed the school. The closure followed testing by a private firm that found levels of radioactive isotope lead-210 that were 22 times the expected level on the kindergarten playground, as well as concerning levels of polonium, radium and other materials inside the building.

    The Corps said preliminary results found no evidence of radioactive material above what would be naturally occurring.

    “From a radiological standpoint, the school is safe,” Col. Kevin Golinghorst, St. Louis District commander for the Corps of Engineers, said in a news release. “We owe it to the public and the parents and children of Jana Elementary School to make informed decisions focused on the safety of the community, and we will continue to take effective actions using accurate data.”

    Corps officials tested inside the school and took samples from 53 locations in the soil on the school grounds. Overall, Golinghorst said, nearly 1,000 samples were taken.

    The Corps said a public event will be held Nov. 16 to discuss the findings with the community.

    A spokeswoman for the Hazelwood School District said officials were in a meeting Wednesday morning but would comment later.

    The school, with about 400 students, sits along Coldwater Creek, a 19-mile (31-kilometer) waterway contaminated decades ago with Manhattan Project atomic waste. The Corps used radiation detection instruments to scan surfaces inside the school, and dug holes up to 28 feet (8.5 meters) deep in the soil.

    Students are taking virtual classes for the next month, then will be reassigned to other schools. It hasn’t been determined when Jana Elementary will reopen.

    Coldwater Creek was contaminated in the 1940s and 1950s when waste from atomic bomb material manufactured in St. Louis got into the waterway near Lambert Airport, where the waste was stored. The result was an environmental mess that resulted in a Superfund declaration in 1989.

    The site near the airport has largely been cleaned up but remediation of the creek itself won’t be finished until 2038, Corps officials have said.

    Children have often played in the creek, and a 2019 federal report determined that those exposed to the waterway from the 1960s to the 1990s may have an increased risk of bone cancer, lung cancer and leukemia. Environmentalists and area residents have cited several instances of extremely rare cancers that have sickened and killed people.

    The Corps of Engineers earlier found contamination in a wooded area near the school, but hadn’t previously tested the school or its grounds. This summer, lawyers involved in a class-action lawsuit representing local residents seeking compensation for illnesses and deaths received permission from the Hazelwood School District to perform testing.

    Results from testing done by Boston Chemical Data Corp. were released in October, prompting the decision to shut down the school. Phone and email messages seeking comment from the law firm that funded the testing weren’t immediately returned on Tuesday.

    It’s unclear exactly what any cleanup would involve, how long it would take or who would pay for it.

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  • Mississippi capital to receive $35.6M in federal water funds

    Mississippi capital to receive $35.6M in federal water funds

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    JACKSON, Miss — Mississippi officials on Friday approved the city of Jackson’s request for $35.6 million in federal funds to help fix its crumbling water infrastructure, following this summer’s flooding-induced breakdowns that left 150,000 people without running water for days.

    The Mississippi Municipality and County Water Infrastructure Grant Program approved the full amount the state’s capital city requested to pay for seven water and sewer projects.

    State lawmakers created the program in 2022 to provide grants matching the federal government’s aid for cities and counties financed through the American Rescue Plan Act. The dollar-for-dollar match means Jackson will have $71.3 million to upgrade its water system.

    Congress passed the sweeping American Rescue Plan Act to tame the public health and economic crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said the funds would help provide reliable drinking water to a city that has periodically lost access to such a basic necessity.

    “We are grateful for the assistance and will continue to explore all potential funding avenues to achieve this end,” Lumumba said.

    Over $400 million in match funds will be awarded for the entire state in two rounds. Applications for the $180 million first round closed on Sept. 30. About 430 cities and counties in Mississippi applied for funding. The second round of funds will be awarded sometime in the spring. Jackson-area legislative leaders plan to press for money during the 2022 legislative session, which begins in January.

    “I was told by the executive director that one of the city’s drinking water projects scored higher than any other application in this first round,” said Democratic Sen. John Horhn of Jackson. “We are looking for the state to do more once the regular session begins in January.”

    A lingering boil water notice preceded the late summer crisis after testing revealed the tap water was unsafe.

    Among seven water and sewer system upgrades, the funds will be used to help replace a raw water pump at the beleaguered O.B. Curtis water treatment plant, which fell into crisis in late August after torrential rain fell in central Mississippi. The deluge altered the raw water quality entering Jackson’s treatment plants. That slowed the treatment process, depleted supplies in water tanks and caused a precipitous drop in pressure.

    Understaffing at its water treatment plants, a shrinking tax base and political disputes between city and state officials have also contributed to the city’s water woes.

    The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that the water in Jackson is safe to drink based on samples it collected over the past several months. But the agency is still waiting on another round of test results to determine whether Jackson has too much lead and copper in its water. The results are expected in mid-November.

    On Oct. 20, the EPA said it was investigating whether Mississippi state agencies have discriminated against Jackson by refusing to fund water system improvements in the city, where more than 80% of residents are Black and about a quarter of the population lives in poverty.

    ———

    Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.

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  • Ian ruins man-made reefs, brings algae bloom to Florida

    Ian ruins man-made reefs, brings algae bloom to Florida

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — Hurricane Ian not only ravaged southwest Florida on land but was destructive underwater as well. It destroyed man-made reefs and brought along red tide, the harmful algae blooms that kill fish and birds, according to marine researchers who returned last week from a six-day cruise organized by the Florida Institute of Oceanography.

    Researchers who used the cruise to study marine life in the Gulf of Mexico following the hurricane say it left in its wake red tide and destroyed artificial reefs from as far away as 30 miles (48 kilometers) from the coast of southwest Florida.

    “The one-time vibrant reefs are now underwater disaster sites themselves,” said Calli Johnson, safety dive officer for the research cruise. “Where there used to be a complete ecosystem, there are now only fish that were able to return after swimming away.”

    Before the Category 4 storm made landfall a month ago, southwest Florida had a reputation for being one of the best saltwater fishing destinations in the U.S. Saltwater and freshwater fishing in Florida has an economic impact of around $13.8 billion, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

    “Time will tell how this affects our greater economy, because changes in the fishing industry and tourism will come from changes in our underwater world,” Johnson said.

    The marine researchers on the cruise found high counts of the naturally-occurring algae that causes red tide offshore Punta Gorda, Boca Grande and southwest of Sanibel Island. It will be several weeks before researchers can analyze water samples that were collected to determine the threat to sea life off the Florida coast.

    The red tide outbreak also is threatening manatees off Sarasota and Charlotte counties that rely on seagrass for food, according to the Ocean Conservancy.

    “Florida is at a crossroads, with a record number of manatees dying,” said J.P. Brooker, director of Florida conservation for the Ocean Conservancy. “We must keep this issue at the forefront, so leaders statewide will invest in solutions to improve water quality—protecting natural habitats to save our beloved manatees.”

    Through mid-October, there have been 719 manatee deaths recorded by Florida wildlife officials. There were 982 manatee deaths last year.

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  • Drought snarls Mississippi River transit in blow to farmers

    Drought snarls Mississippi River transit in blow to farmers

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    ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER — Adam Thomas starts harvesting soybeans on his Illinois farm when the dew burns off in the morning. This year, dry weather accelerated the work, allowing him to start early. His problem was getting the soybeans to market.

    About 60% of the Midwest and northern Great Plain states are in a drought. Nearly the entire stretch of the Mississippi River — from Minnesota to the river’s mouth in Louisiana — has experienced below average rainfall over the past two months. As a result, water levels on the river have dropped to near-record lows, disrupting ship and barge traffic that is critical for moving recently harvested agricultural goods such as soybeans and corn downriver for export.

    Although scientists say climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and intense, a weather expert says this latest drought affecting the central United States is more likely a short-term weather phenomenon.

    The lack of rain has seriously affected commerce. The river moves more than half of all U.S. grain exports but the drought has reduced the flow of goods by about 45%, according to industry estimates cited by the federal government. Prices for rail shipments, an alternative for sending goods by barge, are also up.

    “It just means lower income, basically,” said Mike Doherty, a senior economist with the Illinois Farm Bureau.

    Thomas farms at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and doesn’t own enough grain storage to wait out the high costs of shipping.

    “I’ve had to take a price discount,” he said.

    Climate change is generally driving wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi River region but in recent months, lower water levels have revealed parts that are usually inaccessible. Thousands of visitors last weekend walked across typically submerged riverbed to Tower Rock, a protruding formation about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis. It’s the first time since 2012 that tourists could make the trek and stay dry. On the border of Tennessee and Missouri where the river is a half-mile wide, four-wheeler tracks snake across vast stretches of exposed riverbed.

    In a badly needed break from the dry weather earlier this week, the region finally received some rain.

    “It is kind of taking the edge off the pain of the low water, but it is not going to completely alleviate it,” said Kai Roth of the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, adding that the river needs several rounds of “good, soaking rain.”

    Barges are at risk of hitting bottom and getting stuck in the mud. Earlier this month, the U.S. Coast Guard said there had been at least eight such “groundings.” Some barges touch the bottom but don’t get stuck. Others need salvage companies to help them out. Barges are cautioned to lighten their loads to prevent them from sinking too deep in the water, but that means they can carry fewer goods.

    To ensure that vessels can travel safely, federal officials regularly meet, consider the depth of the river and talk to the shipping industry to determine local closures and traffic restrictions. When a stretch is temporarily closed, hundreds of barges may line up to wait.

    “It’s very dynamic: Things are changing constantly,” said Eric Carrero, the Coast Guard’s director of western rivers and waterways. “Every day, when we are doing our surveys, we’re finding areas that are shallow and they need to dredge.”

    After a closed-down section is dredged, officials mark a safe channel and barges can once again pass through.

    In some places, storage at barge terminals is filling up, preventing more goods from coming in, according to Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. He said the influx of grain into a compromised river transportation system is like “attaching a garden hose to a fire hydrant.” High costs for farmers have led some to wait to ship their goods, he added.

    For tourists, much of the river is still accessible. Cruise ships are built to withstand the river’s extremes: Big engines fight fast currents in the spring and shallow drafts keep the boats moving in a drought, said Charles Robertson, president and CEO of American Cruise Lines, which operates five cruise ships that can carry 150 to 190 passengers each.

    Nighttime operations are limited, however, to help ships avoid new obstacles that the drought has exposed. And some landing areas aren’t accessible because of low water — the river is dried out along the edges. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, a cruise ship couldn’t get to a ramp that typically loads passengers, so the city, with help from townspeople, laid gravel and plywood to create a makeshift walkway. For some, it adds to the adventure.

    “They’re experiencing the headlines that most of the rest of the country is reading,” Robertson said.

    Drought is a prolonged problem in California, which just recorded its driest three-year stretch on record, a situation that has stressed water supplies and increased wildfire risk. Climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and worse.

    “The drier areas are going to continue to get drier and the wetter areas are going to continue to get wetter,” said Jen Brady, a data analyst at Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and researchers that reports on climate change.

    Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said however, that the current drought in the Midwest is likely “driven by short-term weather patterns” and he wouldn’t link it to climate change.

    In the Midwest, climate change is increasing the intensity of some rainstorms. Flood severity on the upper Mississippi River is growing faster than any other area of the country, according to NOAA.

    Some worry that fertilizer and manure have accumulated on farms and could quickly wash off in a hard rain, reducing oxygen levels in rivers and streams and threatening aquatic life.

    In rare cases, communities are moving to alternate sources of drinking water away from the Mississippi. The drought also is threatening to dry out drinking-water wells in Iowa and Nebraska, NOAA says.

    It’s unclear how much longer the drought will last. In the near term, there is a chance for rain, but NOAA notes that in November, below average rainfall is more likely in central states such as Missouri, which would extend shipping problems on the river. In some northern states including Michigan, the winter may bring more moisture, but less rain is expected in southern states.

    “It does take a lot of rainfall to really get the river to rise,” Roth said.

    ———

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • Experts: Lake Mead brain-eating amoeba death among few in US

    Experts: Lake Mead brain-eating amoeba death among few in US

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    LAS VEGAS — The death of a Las Vegas-area teenager from a rare brain-eating amoeba that investigators think he was exposed to in warm waters at Lake Mead should prompt caution, not panic, among people at freshwater lakes, rivers and springs, experts said Friday.

    “It gets people’s attention because of the name,” former public health epidemiologist Brian Labus said of the naturally occurring organism officially called Naegleria fowleri but almost always dubbed the brain-eating amoeba. “But it is a very, very rare disease.”

    The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tallied just 154 cases of infection and death from the amoeba in the U.S. since 1962, said Labus, who teaches at the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Almost half those cases were in Texas and Florida. Only one was reported in Nevada before this week.

    “I wouldn’t say there’s an alarm to sound for this,” Labus said. “People need to be smart about it when they’re in places where this rare amoeba actually lives.” The organism is found in waters ranging from 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 Celsius) to 115 degrees (46 C), he said.

    The Southern Nevada Health District did not identify the teen who died, but said he may have been exposed to the microscopic organism during the weekend of Sept. 30 in the Kingman Wash area on the Arizona side of the Colorado River reservoir behind Hoover Dam. The district publicized the case on Wednesday, following confirmation of the cause from the CDC.

    The district and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which oversees the lake and the Colorado River, noted the amoeba only infects people by entering the nose and migrating to the brain. It is almost always fatal.

    “It cannot infect people if swallowed, and is not spread from person to person,” news releases from the two agencies said. Both advised people to avoid jumping or diving into bodies of warm water, especially during summer, and to keep the head above water in hot springs or other “untreated geothermal waters” that pool in pocket canyons in the vast recreation area.

    “It is 97% fatal but 99% preventable,” said Dennis Kyle, professor of infectious diseases and cellular biology and director of the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases at the University of Georgia. “You can protect yourself by not jumping into water that gets up your nose, or use nose plugs.”

    The amoeba causes primary amebic meningoencephalitis, a brain infection with symptoms resembling meningitis or encephalitis that initially include headache, fever, nausea or vomiting — then progress to stiff neck, seizures and coma that can lead to death.

    Symptoms can start one to 12 days after exposure, and death usually occurs within about five days.

    There is no known effective treatment, and Kyle said a diagnosis almost always comes too late.

    Kyle, who has studied the organism for decades, said data did not immediately suggest that waters warmed by climate change affected the amoeba. He said he knew of fewer than four cases nationwide.

    A survey of news reports found cases in Northern California, Nebraska and Iowa. A CDC map showed most cases during the last 60 years in Southern U.S. states, led by 39 cases in Texas and 37 in Florida.

    “I think this year is sort of an average year for cases,” Kyle said. “But this was a very warm summer. The key point is that warmer weather tends to generate more amoeba in the environment.”

    Not many labs regularly identify the organism, Kyle noted. He said that AdventHealth Central Florida recently joined the CDC with programs able to identify it.

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