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For the third year in a row, Bakersfield, California ranks as the nation’s second smoggiest city in America. Coming in just behind Los Angeles, Bakersfield is also the second most ozone-polluted cities.
But, that’s not all. Bakersfield has now moved into first place as the city with the most fine particulate pollution. According to an annual American Lung Association (ALA) report, which ranks America’s cities with the unhealthiest air, Bakersfield was third behind Pittsburgh and Los Angeles last year.
Continue reading Bakersfield, California’s Air Pollution
photo credit: Bálint Fejér, via Creative Commons
On January 30, 2000, a toxic chemical spill destroyed wildlife, devastated fish stocks and threatened the water supplies of nearly 2.5 million people in central Eastern Europe.
Romania’s Somes River, Hungary’s Tisza River and Yugoslavia’s Danube River, which is Europe’s largest waterway, were each catastrophically polluted. The toxic spill eventually reached the Black Sea and affected Romania, Hungary and, to a lesser extent, Serbia and Montenegro.
The spill began when the dam containing toxic waste material from the Baia Mare Aurul gold mine in North Western Romania burst and released roughly 3.5 million cubic feet (100,000 cubic metres) of waste water, heavily contaminated with cyanide, into the Lapus and Somes tributaries of the river Tisza, which is a tributary of the great Danube River.
Cyanide is extremely toxic and lethal to humans and animals, even in very small doses. It works by making the body unable to use life-sustaining oxygen. The cyanide-laced water continued to flow and soon reached the Danube, which flows through Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.
At this point, the cyanide reached a deadly density of 800 times the accepted maximum safe level. The situation was going from bad to worse because Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania all get drinking water from the Danube. (As a point of reference, the American standard as regulated by the Environmenal Protection Agency allows 0.2 parts cyanide per 1 million parts water (0.2 ppm) in U.S. drinking water.)
Loyola de Palacio, the European Union Commissioner for Transport and Energy, called the cyanide spill “a catastrophe of European dimensions.”
Officials from Hungary called the spill Europe’s worst ecological disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant calamity in the Ukraine. Shortly after this disaster, Hungary’s Tisza River was officially declared a dead river.
Continue reading Eastern Europe Cyanide Spill
Photo by Mohd Fahmi via Creative Commons
Snakehead fish are large, freshwater predators from the Channidae family that are native to Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia and various locations throughout Asia. These fish are plentiful in their native waters as there are some 28 varieties of snakehead fish.
The snakehead fish is very unique and different from the average fish. While they are similar, in body-type, to muscular eels, some snakehead varieties can grow to at least four feet in length. This fish got its name because of its stereotypically flat, snake-like head and toothed mouth.
What really make the snakehead so unique is its voracious appetite and its ability to breathe air. This fish is so adaptable, in fact, that it can travel short distances across land and live for short stents of time out of the water.
Continue reading Northern Snakehead Fish Invasion
Lake Mead is the largest man-made reservoir and lake in America. With more than 500 miles of sunny shoreline and an area of more than 150,000 acres, Lake Mead has long been a utopia for the more than eight million visitors who seek out this recreational Mecca.
But, the vast reservoir was built for far more than recreation. In fact, the massive Hoover Dam, which was completed in 1935, provides this desert region and surrounding states with a reliable water supply from the Colorado River as well as an excellent and inexpensive source of electricity.
Covering the state lines of Arizona and Nevada, Lake Mead stores water from the vast Colorado River, which runs through a whopping seven states – Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. So, to say that Lake Mead and the irreplaceable Colorado River are important to the citizens of the western states, would be a huge understatement.
However, for the past decade Lake Mead has been battling the worst 10-year drought in recorded history along the Colorado River, which feeds the 110-mile-long reservoir.
Continue reading Lake Mead Drought
Suzanne Kanehl posted this in Cities, General, Pollution, Water
For decades, we have heard about the dangerous pesticides, herbicides and a myriad of industrial chemicals that have the potential of reaping havoc on our environment. Most of us take these dangerous chemicals, many which have caused lasting environmental damage throughout history, very seriously. And, rightly so. However, there are other synthetic chemicals that enter our waterways daily but are still not deemed as much of a danger to the planet. These drugs are “steroids.”
Photo credit: Hot Raw Sewage by Trey Ratcliff
Continue reading Secondhand Pill
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