This not an act of God.
Just to pimp another section of our website, you should check out the "What We're Reading" section at the bottom of the main page and on the right-hand side of the blog. We're a little busy now and then, and we don't always get to blog as much as we would like. However, this nifty little tool allows us to note the articles we think are important and worth reading. If you're into the RSS feed thing like we are, you can scroll to the bottom of the box and subscribe to a feed.
Along the Mississippi River, they’re watching the levees. In northern Missouri, they’re watching the walls of lagoons holding back millions of gallons of animal waste.
Rains this week were filling waste lagoons on industrial farms, and some were leaking and overflowing.
State officials, worried that lagoon walls might collapse, have told farmers that they can lower lagoon levels by spraying the waste on fields, even though the ground was soaked from rainfall.
“All the lagoons are overflowing or right at the edge,” said Karl Fett, regional director of the Department of Natural Resources office in Lee’s Summit. “It is a dire situation.”
Missouri has never faced the failure of so many lagoons and potential contamination of waterways, state officials and environmentalists said. The lagoons were built to collect waste from animals on industrial farms, which have proliferated in Missouri in recent years.
We have no doubt that the pollution resulting from the recent floods has reached epic proportions, similar to what happened after Katrina. Unfortunately, politicians tend to view this sort of thing as unpreventable. On the contrary, maybe if we didn't have government policy to favor consolidation and CAFOs and did have some decent local control policies, this sort of thing could easily be avoided. We're just saying.