Lagniappe (a little something extra)

Around the Gulf . . .
Two significant efforts to improve the state of water quality in the city of Baton Rouge occurred this winter. The Baton Rouge-based tugboat company McKinney Towing, Inc., was charged a $400,000 fine for illegally pumping bilge water into the Mississippi River several times a week from 1995 to 2000, and the company’s president received six months of home confinement. In addition, the city settled with the Louisiana and U.S. governments over years of sewage overflows, requiring improvements to municipal sewage treatment and collection systems.

Two of Florida’s National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERR) were expanded last fall, adding 90,000 acres of upland and submerged lands to the 20,000 acre Rookery Bay NERR in southwest Florida near Naples and 53,427 acres of uplands to the 247,185 acre Apalachicola NERR in the Florida panhandle.

Two new species were added to the Endangered Species List this December. The Fish and Wildlife Service listed the vermilion darter, a small, bright colored fish only found in Alabama and the Mississippi gopher frog, the nation’s rarest amphibian found only at a single site in DeSoto National Forest in Harrison County, Mississippi.

Around the Nation . . .

The Coast Guard issued a final rule on November 2 (which became effective December 3, 2001) to conform regulations governing the operational discharges of oil, garbage record-keeping requirements, and other activities to international maritime pollution standards. The final rule can be viewed at 66 Federal Register 55,566.

In November, the EPA announced its decision to adopt the Arsenic Rule developed during the Clinton Administration, requiring a 10 parts per billion (ppb) standard to be effective in 2006. It is estimated that the EPA received tens of thousands of public comments regarding the standard, many calling for an even lower standard, such as the 5 ppb recommended by the World Health Organization.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has inscribed new natural sites and expanded others on the World Heritage List including the naming of the Brazilian Atlantic Islands, which provide breeding and feeding areas for tuna, sharks, sea turtles, and the largest concentration of tropical seabirds in the Western Atlantic Ocean and the expansion of the Galapagos Islands site to include the Galapagos Marine Reserve covering more than 5,000 additional miles.

Australia has listed the whale shark, the world’s largest fish, as nationally threatened under its Environment Protection and Biodiversity and Conservation Act. Globally rare, the whale shark grows up to 58 feet long and more than 20 metric tons, and has been proposed to be included in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species which would provide monitoring of trade in the sharks and their parts.