Million dead fish swamp L.A.-area marina Skip to main content

Million dead fish swamp L.A.-area marina

Image: Dead fish
Lucy Nicholson  /  Reuters
Some of the dead fish at King Harbor Marina in Redondo Beach, Calif., are seen Tuesday. The fish were a foot thick in areas, one official said.
LOS ANGELES — Sardines and other small fish in the hundreds of thousands washed up dead overnight in the harbor area of Redondo Beach, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, puzzling authorities and triggering a cleanup effort.
Local television news footage showed the mass of dead fish, said by a police spokesman to be about a foot deep on the surface, choking the waters in and around dozens of private boat slips in the King Harbor Marina.
Biologists have tentatively concluded that the fish died from oxygen deprivation after being driven by a storm into a closed-off pier area, California Department of Fish and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan told Reuters.
"It looks like they just swam in the wrong direction and ended up in a corner of the pier that doesn't have any free-flowing oxygen in it," Hughan said.
"There's nothing that appears to be out of sorts, no oil sheen no chemicals, no sign of any kind of illegal activity," Hughan said. "As one fisherman just told me, this is natural selection."
Hughan said such incidents were rare but not unheard of.
While biologists investigated, authorities were beginning the job of removing the fish from the water, using buckets and nets.
A skip loader then carried them to big trash bins. Officials initially estimated there were millions of fish, but Fish and Game roughly estimated about a million.
City officials estimated the cleanup would cost $100,000. Fire Chief Dan Madrigal said the fish would be taken to a landfill specializing in organic materials.
On the water, nature was tackling the problem in other ways.
"The seals are gorging themselves," Hughan said.
Large groups of other fish could be seen nibbling at the floating mats of dead creatures.
"The sea's going to recycle everything. It's the whole circle-of-life thing," Hughan said.
PhotoBlog: More images of the fish die-off
Trudy Padilla, the marina's tenant services coordinator, said the dead fish suddenly began showing up overnight, and that one end of the marina was blocked off as cleanup operations got organized.
She said the smell of decay has not become so strong yet, "but it's going to if they don't clean up the fish."
King Harbor Marina provides 850 boat slips to private vessels.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41972653/ns/us_news-environment/?GT1=43001
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chronology of the Press in Burma

1836 – 1846 * During this period the first English-language newspaper was launched under British-ruled Tenasserim, southern  Burma . The first ethnic Karen-language and Burmese-language newspapers also appear in this period.     March 3, 1836 —The first English-language newspaper,  The Maulmain Chronicle , appears in the city of Moulmein in British-ruled Tenasserim. The paper, first published by a British official named E.A. Blundell, continued up until the 1950s. September 1842 —Tavoy’s  Hsa-tu-gaw  (the  Morning Star ), a monthly publication in the Karen-language of  Sgaw ,  is established by the Baptist mission. It is the first ethnic language newspaper. Circulation reached about three hundred until its publication ceased in 1849. January 1843 —The Baptist mission publishes a monthly newspaper, the Christian  Dhamma  Thadinsa  (the  Religious Herald ), in Moulmein. Supposedly the first Burmese-language newspaper, it continued up until the first year of the second Angl
Post a Comment
Read more

ARSA claims ambush on Myanmar security forces

Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on Sunday claimed responsibility for an ambush on Myanmar security forces that left several wounded in northern Rakhine state, the first attack in weeks in a region gutted by violence. Rakhine was plunged into turmoil last August, when a series of ARSA raids prompted a military backlash so brutal the UN says it likely amounts to ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya minority. The army campaign sent some 650,000 Rohingya fleeing for Bangladesh, where refugees have given harrowing accounts of rape, murder and arson at the hands of security forces and vigilantes. Myanmar's military, which tightly controls information about Rakhine, denies any abuses and insists the crackdown was a proportionate response to crush the "terrorist" threat. ARSA have launched few attacks in recent months.  But the army reported that "about ten" Rohingya terrorists ambushed a car with hand-made mines and gunfire on Friday morning
Post a Comment
Read more

Thai penis whitening trend raises eyebrows

Image copyright LELUXHOSPITAL Image caption Authorities warn the procedure could be quite painful A supposed trend of penis whitening has captivated Thailand in recent days and left it asking if the country's beauty industry is taking things too far. Skin whitening is nothing new in many Asian countries, where darker skin is often associated with outdoor labour, therefore, being poorer. But even so, when a clip of a clinic's latest intriguing procedure was posted online, it quickly went viral. Thailand's health ministry has since issued a warning over the procedure. The BBC Thai service spoke to one patient who had undergone the treatment, who told them: "I wanted to feel more confident in my swimming briefs". The 30-year-old said his first session of several was two months ago, and he had since seen a definite change in the shade. 'What for?' The original Facebook post from the clinic offering the treatment, which uses lasers to break do
1 comment
Read more