In the United States, fertilizers are causing the death of hundreds of thousands of fish

River banks lined with carcasses and dead fish visible through the water:this is the image described by American officials who revealed that in the Nishnabotna River, a tributary of the Missouri, a fertilizer spill wiped out much of the aquatic life for a 60-mile stretch (about 97 km) causing a massacre and an environmental disaster.Over 789,000 fish would have been killed in what is one of the most ecologically devastating chemical spills in recent years in the region.Most of the species involved are small, but thousands of catfish and carp were also found among the carcasses found.Matt Combes, scientific supervisor of the ecological health unit for the Missouri Department of Conservation, estimated that about 40,000 fish have died within his state alone, adding that even trying to find the words for "a near total die-off for 60 miles of river it is astounding and daunting.”According to Andrew Loftus then, fisheries biologist and author, lThe tragedy would also be environmental as the ecosystem "could take decades to fully recover".

According to Iowa officials, interviewed from the New York Times, the latest die-off began when a valve on a storage tank at NEW Cooperative — a farm in Red Oak, southwest Iowa — was left open over a weekend.The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which learned of the spill on March 11, said that 265,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen fertilizer spilled into a drainage ditch and in the East Nishnabotna River, a tributary of the Nishnabotna River and thus of the Missouri.According to i state data of Iowa then, the massacre of fish was one of the five worst ever recorded and the worst since 2013, when runoff from a dairy farm killed more than 800,000 fish.Andrew Loftus, fisheries biologist and author, said:“People would be surprised at how many small and medium-sized killings there are in the United States.We just don't have a certain number of them.But they are happening quite frequently."

Gary Whelan, vice president of the American Fisheries Society, a non-profit organization that aims to protect aquatic conservation, put the brakes on:«Certainly the length of the affected river is quite long and the numbers large, but the affected biomass is probably quite low, given that the killing was mostly of small fish and chub species».However, Iowa officials revealed that at the site of the spill the contaminated soil and contaminated water would still be in the process of being removed.“I'm not really holding my breath, but I really hope this wakes up some people to the sad state of our waterways here,” said Alicia Vasto, water program director for the Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit profit seeking stricter regulations in the region.

[by Roberto Demaio]