Articles Tagged: Mississippi River

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a disaster proclamation for two more counties in response to Mississippi River flooding on Friday.

The Minnesota-based company 3M has announced it will phase out its use of PFAS -- known as “forever chemicals” -- because they don’t break down in the environment, and they linger in people’s bodies for years. But the question of how to clean them up could persist for years to come.

While the presence of the black carp in part of the Mississippi River basin has been previously reported, the research concludes that the population is now self-sustaining.

A record-breaking drought throughout the Mississippi River basin is finally beginning to ease, federal officials say.

This fall, the towns and rural farmsteads along the Mississippi River received alarming news about their drinking water. Chemicals from a large 3M factory north of Cordova found a way into the river and their wells.

The requirement, part of an EPA administrative order, comes as the agency is accelerating its response to so-called “forever chemicals.”

City leaders shared wide-ranging impacts of dry conditions at a news conference last week hosted by the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative -- from barge slowdowns to water main breaks caused by shifting dry ground.

States across the Mississippi River basin are experiencing drought more commonly found in the arid Southwest, federal data show. The dryness has disrupted agriculture, beached barges and upset ecosystems across large swaths of the Midwest, Great Plains and beyond, in epic proportions — even as the region also sees climate change-induced increases in rainfall.

As rainfall has increased — a symptom of our warming atmosphere — the frequency of flooding has intensified. Now, river-adjacent communities like Cedar Rapids are turning away from flood mitigation to instead make room for the water.

The report focuses only on releases from industry - not farm and animal feeding operations, which exacerbate the pollution problem.

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A large cruise ship is making its way down the Mississippi River with stops in several Iowa cities.

At least 25 destructive species — like water fleas and bloody red shrimp — are inching closer to the Mississippi River Basin.

Fishers on the Tennessee side of the Mississippi River are told: don’t eat the fish because they may contain high levels of contaminants. But on the other side of the same river, in Arkansas, fishers find no such warnings. Those state-issued fish consumption advisories for the Mississippi River make it difficult to make informed health decisions, experts say.

Like the Great Lakes initiative, it would operate within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and provide hundreds of millions in federal funding to groups throughout the 10 states including Iowa along the river.