News from our journalists and contributors about Iowa water quality, trends, conservation, watershed, stream nitrate levels and investigative journalism from The Gazette.
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.
Iowa’s fish consumption guidelines are now based on tissue sampling, but state officials want to move to a system based on size of fish, regardless of where they swim.
In The Gazette’s first round of exploring what the new legislation means to Iowa, we’re focusing on six ways you’ll see changes in energy, climate and farming.
Three are statewide projects, some of which may go toward the Middle Cedar Watershed.
The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force, a partnership formed in the late 1990s with the goal of reducing the size and severity of the hypoxic zone, currently is co-chaired by Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig.
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.
Seven Iowans have appealed state regulators’ decision to grant a water use permit to an 11,600-head northeast Iowa cattle feedlot.
The over-application increased the risk of contaminating nearby waterways with nitrate, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
A Cedar Rapids landscaping company has partnered with a team of former Iowa State University researchers to sell a climate-friendly additive to fertilizer that some experts tout as key to soil rejuvenation and carbon sequestration. It may also help with water quality.
The report, released last month, shows increasingly wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi River over the past few decades, a trend that — spurred by climate change and land-use practices — looks likely to continue.
The city of Cedar Rapids has published its annual water quality report for 2021, which provides a comprehensive look at the past year’s drinking water quality. The city’s finished water had no violations.
“This is a strong statement from the EPA that these are a dangerous class of chemicals,” said David Cwiertny, director of the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa.
The city has done regular water tests at the lake, called Sand Lake, in previous summers, but this is the first time there has been a no swim advisory due to high levels of E. coli bacteria, said Tyler Baird, superintendent of Parks & Forestry.
LaPorte City has agreed to pay a $7,000 fine for discharging too much E. coli bacteria in treated wastewater going into Wolf Creek, a Cedar River tributary.
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