If you’re planning on fishing around Watertown, NY or Lowville or Stillwater Reservoir anytime soon, check out this story of the giant manure spill. What a mess!
[url=http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050811201309990004:8e787]http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050811201309990004[/url:8e787]
Follow up story here:
[url=http://www.news10now.com/story.asp?ArID=47228:5c5a9]http://www.news10now.com/story.asp?ArID=47228[/url:5c5a9]
They’re saying that the impact on fishing will last for years. This is a sad accident.
Tres Mal. I cannot believe (yes I really can) that this kind of thing can happen. It is one of the problems of large scale agribusiness forcing the closing of smaller farms. Hope this is not your home waters.
jed
This kind of thing - unfortunately - does happen. Likely more often than one realizes.
Here, back in Sept. 2002, the City of Winnipeg’s sewage system had a drastic failure. Resultant of 462,500 cubic meters (122,179,596 US gal.) of raw - untreated sewage pumped into the Red River. During the fall-out of the failure, I found out this system fails on average - 11 times a year - not in same quantities - but repetative failures.
What happened to the City - nothing. Sure - court dates and charges - they got a slap on the wrist with a please fix-it. Recommendations for fixing - that’s about it. (I’ll stop before I rant).
There was a short upset to the rivers fishery on the big dump - but nothing severely noticeable to the average fisherman. There was more the impact to recreational activites (ie/ beach-going) due to high e-coli levels. Now this is warm water species (channel cats, carp, freshwater drum, sauger, walleye, northern pike, etc.). The fishery survived and is still going strong - maybe due to tolerance already attained by the repeat offences ? … ? … ? … Still - not something we like to hear about (or wade in) …
Makes the thought of remote sites, small streams or ocean fishing all the more interesting.
jed