September has, so far, been more like August is supposed to be than August was. On an early morning bike ride along the Mississippi, however, it was evident from the colors and the falling leaves that Fall really was here.

These pictures were taken in Minneapolis between the Franklin Avenue and Lake Street bridges. The sun was just coming up enough to highlight the changing leaves, and bring some sunshine to a couple of rowers on the river, and the now obligatory heron hanging out on a rock.

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico has been one of those things that everyone knows is a problem, has a pretty good notion of what causes it, but complications involving who’s responsible for cleaning up the mess and enforcing the rules has prevented much of anything being done about it.

Looks like that’s about to change.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a program Thursday that will provide the money over the next four years to Minnesota and 11 other states in the Mississippi River basin.

Calling the river “a critical national resource,” Vilsack said the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative will attempt to reduce excessive nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms that enters the river through its tributaries and creates a “dead zone” each summer in the Gulf of Mexico. The nutrients cause vast algae blooms that eventually die, sink to the bottom and are consumed by bacteria that rob the water of most of its oxygen.

My own gut feeling is that $320 million in funding will prove to be just a start on what’s needed to clean up the Mississippi River, but at least it’s a start, one that’s long overdue.

The problem is huge, it’s right there in front of our face, and yet we still haven’t really tried to do anything about it.

The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, an area choked by low oxygen levels that threatens marine life, is smaller than expected this year but more deadly, the government said on Monday.

The zone, caused by a runoff of agricultural chemicals from farms along the Mississippi River, measured about 3,000 square miles or about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware, compared with estimates that it would measure up to nearly 8,500 square miles, scientists said.

Unlike other efforts in other regions that have dead zones, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the Baltic Sea, numerical goals have not been set for reducing nutrients from areas near the Mississippi basin, (Donald) Boesch said.

The dead zone’s not going away until we control its source, all the crap that gets dumped in to the Mi8ssissippi River. That will take the cooperation of everyone who lives along the river and its tributaries. Given the current economic and political climate, that could take a while. Which means the dead zone will probably be with us for many years to come.

It’s taken years of effort involving dumping of waste from towns, cities and farms, coupled with a lack of any overall coordinating effort to control pollution, but that effort has finally paid off, and the Mississippi River Delta is now firmly established as the worst polluted marine ecosystem in the world.

Scientists at the University of California-Santa Barbara who performed the first integrated analysis of all coastal areas of the world conclude the nutrient runoff from upstream farms that flows down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico is responsible for the most tainted coastal ecosystem in the world.

These nutrients have led to a persistent dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an overgrowth of algae that feeds on the nutrients and takes up most of the oxygen in the water, depriving other marine organisms of the oxygen they need to survive.

“Resource management and conservation in coastal waters must address a litany of impacts from human activities, from the land, such as urban runoff and other types of pollution, and from the sea,” said Benjamin Halpern, the study’s lead author, who is based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara.

The next most polluted river delta in the world is the Ganges in India, followed closely by the Mekong in Vietnam and China’s Pearl River. They are all in danger of being polluted to death, but the Mississippi tops the list, pretty much insuring that the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone will also continue to be the world’s largest. people can say whatever they want about the United States’ status in world affairs, but when it comes to polluting a major river system, no one does it better than we do.

Too often when the Mississippi River comes up in the discussion it’s about run-off pollution or flooding or invasive species. But not all the news about the river is bad. Stretches of the river are cleaner now than a generation ago, and up here at the northern end of the river some of the native species of mussels are actually making a comeback, with a little help from their friends.

Federal divers waded into the Mississippi River Wednesday looking for signs of life. Finding the winged mapleleaf mussels that had been planted last fall downstream from the Ford Dam would give hope that even sensitive native species can once again survive there.

“Forty or fifty years ago you couldn’t find anything alive in this section of the river, let alone think about reintroducing an endangered species here,” said Byron Karns, biologist for the National Park Service.

The divers found the mussels they were looking for, and they were healthy, giving rise to hope that the species may eventually re-establish itself in the river. Zebra mussels beware, the natives are coming back.

The Upper Mississippi River floodplain is home to many of the country’s largest and most important wetlands. Several of those swamps and marshes are right here in Minnesota, and it’s good to see that their value, along with many others, is being recognized.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has designated portions of the Upper Mississippi River, including the largest national wildlife refuge in the Midwest, as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

The designation includes about 470 square miles of federal and state lands and waters of the Upper Mississippi River floodplain from near Wabasha, Minnesota to north of Rock Island, Illinois.

It includes all of the 375 square mile Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge headquartered in Winona, Minnesota and the adjacent 10 square mile Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin.

One cool thing here is the recognition that the individual wetlands are part of a larger system, all of it important to the river, the streams that flow in to it, and the water tables of the surrounding land.

Images of flooding rivers in Fargo and the surrounding area led to a walk this morning down to the Mississippi, to see how high the water is here. Minneapolis and St Paul are lucky in that they are built on bluffs lining the river, so extensive urban flooding is not likely here. It’s farther downstream, where the river widens and the land flattens that flooding becomes a major issue, and judging by the amount of water in the river here, fargo won’t be the last flood story of this Spring.

Whe the water is this high, St Anthony Falls is transformed into a churning frothy mass of water.

St Anthony Falls

St Anthony Falls

The most dramatic action, though, was the water going through the locks, where the gates were open and water was just racing through. I’d never seen them before with such high water and the gates open, so I can’t say for sure whether that’s normal practice. But it sure makes afor a wicked set of whitewater rapids.

Lock Rapids

After reading the comments in yesterday’s Star-Tribune report on wild turkeys in Minneapolis I started to feel like I must be the only home in town who hasn’t seen one of these birds. So I headed out this morning to what sounded like a likely spot to see if I could spot one of our rare urban-dwelling wild turkeys.

As you can see, there actually are a few stretches along the Mississippi River near downtown Minneapolis where it looks like a turkey would feel right at home.

River Path 1

River Path 2

This particular stretch of the river is also near where 35W Bridge collapsed, in fact the bike and walking paths were only re-opened a few weeks ago. It’s getting harder to tell what happened here, but there is still a field full of debris not far from the new bridge, mostly large chunks of metal that have been twisted and piled up until the whole thing resembles some kind of surrealistic, aleatoric sculpture garden.

Metal On Metal

Meanwhile, back to the bird hunt. There were no turkeys under or near the bridge, or anywhere else I walked this morning. I did see a couple of mallard ducks, a hawk of some kind, and, along the river’s edge, a pair of canadian geese. Wherever these two had spent the Winter it must have been fairly pleasant, because they were about as fat as two geese can get.

Shore Geese

Looks like the recent sludge spill in Tennessee is just the tip of the proverbial ash pile.

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

The increase in stored ash and waste is ironically a consequence of stricter air pollution laws and improved technology. More of the pollutants from burning coal are captured as solid waste before being emitted . The problem is there are almost no regulations dealing with how to store and manage that waste. And as the Tennessee spill shows, that’s a big problem.

Minnesota has three of these ash piles, and the good news is state officials are already looking in to it.

Three Minnesota dikes that hold vast amounts of coal waste ash will be inspected by state engineers in light of the disastrous ash sludge spill last month in Tennessee, State Dam Engineer Jason Boyle said.

The dikes, which are 18 to 50 feet high and classified as dams, are at three large coal-fired power plants near Becker, Cohasset and Hoyt Lakes. The dikes enclose ponds filled with wet ash left over from burning coal and containing lead, mercury and other compounds.

These are earthen dams and are at least reputed to be of stronger construction than the ones that failed in Tennessee. But here’s a reason Minnesotans should be at least a little concerned about them.

For two of the three Minnesota ash dikes, Boyle said, he could find no records of inspections by state engineers despite a rule that calls for checks at least every eight years. He didn’t know why they hadn’t been checked.

The biggest ash dike is only forty-five miles northwest of the Twin Cities and not far from the Mississippi River. All that is at stake is the drinking water for a couple of million people. That would seem to be more than enough reason to regulate that waste and inspect those dams.

Pollution in the Mississippi River is nothing new, that it feeds into a growing “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico has been known for several decades. So why does a report from the National Research Council on how to deal with the problem of run-off pollution in the Mississippi read as if no one had ever thought about it until today?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture should jointly establish a Nutrient Control Implementation Initiative (NCII) to learn more about the effectiveness of actions meant to improve water quality throughout the Mississippi River basin and into the northern Gulf of Mexico, says a new report from the National Research Council. The report also advises how to move forward on the larger process of allocating nutrient loading caps — which entails delegating responsibilities for reducing nutrient pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus — across the basin. In addition, the two agencies should jointly establish a Mississippi River Basin Water Quality Center to administer the NCII and to conduct related water-quality monitoring and research.

“A Nutrient Control Implementation Initiative would represent an important step toward EPA developing water-quality criteria and states setting water-quality standards,” said David Moreau, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor in the departments of city and regional planning and environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “However, efforts to reduce nutrients in the northern Gulf of Mexico will face significant management, economic, and public policy challenges, as well as a time lag — a decade at minimum — between reducing pollutants across the river basin and identifying water-quality improvements downstream in the gulf.”

The Gulf of Mexico’s oxygen-depleted “dead zone” derives from excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and other sources, flowing into the gulf from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Numerous federal and state regulatory agencies and water-quality standards govern conditions across the 31-state river basin. To better meet nutrient and sediment reduction objectives in the Clean Water Act — and in turn help improve water quality in the Mississippi River basin and into the northern Gulf of Mexico — EPA asked the Research Council for advice on how to initiate nutrient pollutant control programs, identify alternatives for allocating reductions of nutrient discharges into bodies of water, and document the effectiveness of these strategies.

Not that the report isn’t full of good intentions and ideas, but it’s main concern seems to be how to organize and cut across the lines that divide the many competing afgencies from working together to solve the problem. That’s a necessary first step, but one that should have been solved long ago. Long enough so that a National Research Council report could have been issued this week on how to solve the problem, instead of recommendations on how to get ready to solve the problem in, as the spokesperson put it, “a decade at minimum.”