They say the deadness in the Gulf of Mexico is a mystery. It is not. It was probably in part due to that one “really big experiment”.
The article about the deadzone Monday.
Gulf of Mexico Mystery
Miller says he’s never seen such death and devastation under water in his 20 years of diving.
“All the coral, all the sponges, all the crabs, not a single living thing, all the star fish, the brittle stars, everything’s dead,” said Miller
They should not have been surprised at all. They knew what was going to happen, and profit for corporations outweighed their caring for the environment.
Last Stand: A Ribbon of Wastewater
“For two weeks, a barge has been dumping millions of gallons of wastewater from a bankrupt fertilizer plant into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, looping currents have drawn water from the dump zone, along with a huge plume of runoff from the Mississippi River, toward the Keys and into the Florida Straits. Satellite tracking showed traces of the stream off Marathon on Friday and it likely will continue to flow up along the East Coast.
Scientists monitoring the state’s ocean dumping plan don’t expect significant effects, but the nutrient-laced stream brings with it considerable uncertainty and the unsettling specter of fish-killing red tides and the ”black water” algae bloom that devastated sensitive corals, sponges and seagrasses in the Keys last year.
”We don’t really know what the impact will be,” said Mitchell Roffer, a Miami-based biological oceanographer hired to monitor the dumping for the fishing industry. “This is really one big experiment.”
There is little to worry about, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection insists.
The agency concocted the controversial and expensive ( about $120 million) scheme to dispose of about 500 million gallons of highly acidic water brimming in pits perilously close to fragile Tampa Bay.
It was still going on in 2003, and in 2004 to some degree after the hurricanes here. Jeb knew it. His legislative friends knew it, the DOE and the EPA knew it. They did not care.
I wish I could find my back records on these phosphate mines. I know that the owners polluted, sold, and left the country. Last I heard, one of them, a close Bush friend was living high on the hog in a middle east country. I will find it someday. These companies knew they were destroying my state in many ways, radio-active gypsum piles still standing, acidic water not controlled.
They knew dumping toxic wastes in the Gulf of Mexico would kill the life there. They just did not care.
