The New York Times is reporting on our recent notice of intent to sue the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago for violations of the Clean Water Act. Read the full NYT article here.

Immediate Release:
August 3, 2010

CHAMPAIGN, IL — Long before the BP oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico suffered from a chronic spill of chemicals that rush down the Mississippi River from Illinois and other Midwestern states. The influx of pollution results in an area appropriately known as the Dead Zone. Scientists from Louisiana just finished their annual research cruise of the Gulf and determined that this year the Dead Zone was 7,722 square miles, one of the largest since the cruises began in 1985 and almost the size of Massachusetts.

The Dead Zone is characterized by water so low in dissolved oxygen (<2 mg/L) that animals suffocate. When shrimp, crab, and other relatively immobile species cannot escape, fishermen must move to cleaner waters.

The primary cause of the Dead Zone is too many nutrients. According to recent studies by the U.S. Geological Survey, Illinois is the number one contributor of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution to the Gulf of Mexico. {Continue Reading »}

Image courtesy of http://www.cop.noaa.gov/images/GOMhypoxia_map.jpg

Stacy James, one of PRN’s Water Resources Scientist, was recently quoted by the NEW ORLEANS METRO REAL-TIME NEWS regarding a new initiative funded through the US Department of Agriculture to target and reduce agricultural runoff into the Mississippi river in order to reduce the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Read the full article here: ”Plan to fight Gulf ‘dead zone’ will target agricultural polluters.”

The Gulf of Mexico is over 500 miles south of Illinois, but we are very much connected to the Gulf via our rivers and streams. Most of Illinois’ waterways eventually reach the Mississippi River, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans. Therefore, pollution that originates in Illinois eventually winds up polluting the nation’s second longest river and the source of a lot of our seafood.

Pollution from Illinois and other states in the Mississippi River Basin has been linked with an area within the Gulf of Mexico known as the Dead Zone. The Dead Zone forms every summer off the coast of Louisiana, and averages 5,000 square miles.

For more information, visit our Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone page.

For Immediate Release
July 30 , 2007

Champaign, IL – A team of researchers just finished mapping the size of the “Dead Zone” in the northern Gulf of Mexico, and at 7900 mi2, it is the third largest since monitoring began in 1985.  The Dead Zone is an area of hypoxic water that forms every summer along the Gulf Coast and robs ocean life of oxygen.  Species that cannot escape the hypoxia may perish, and those able to migrate may have to swim outside of the Dead Zone to survive.   

The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone is of enough concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that an independent team of scientists was assembled to study the causes and nature of the hypoxia.  The team, known as the Science Advisory Board Hypoxia Advisory Panel, recently released a second draft of their report. {Continue Reading »}

For Immediate Release
April 20th, 2004

Ocean policy report identifies pollution from inland states as significant problem.

(Washington D.C.) The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, a congressionally established 16-member panel tasked with studying the status of and threats facing the nation’s oceans, today provided its comprehensive report based on two years of work to governors and members of Congress. It represents the first Congressionally-mandated review of our national ocean policy in more than 30 years and includes recommendations for a coordinated and comprehensive national ocean policy.

The report is the second of two high-level ocean studies to appear in the past twelve months, and the U.S. Commission study arrived at the same major findings as the independently established Pew Oceans Commission did last year: Overfishing, pollution, coastal development, habitat destruction and mismanagement are leading to the decline of ocean wildlife and the collapse of entire ocean ecosystems. Key among the findings were the impact that nutrient pollution, much of it coming from inland states, is having on the marine ecosystem. {Continue Reading »}