Friends of Rural New York

The Buffalo News has updated the story it did a year ago about water pollution in Western NY.  They almost reluctantly mention agricultural runoff.  There is a whole series of this story.

AND IT’S NOT JUST BUFFALO !! It’s Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico and on and on and on. When will we stop the corporate farming criminals?

http://www.buffalonews.com/320/story/151627.html

By Michael Beebe
Updated: 08/30/07 5:27 PM

Buffalo’s booming industry near the turn of the previous century had so polluted the Buffalo River that scientists in 1929 could not find a single living fish in the river. The oxygen level was zero. Not even a sludge worm was found. The Buffalo River was dead. By that standard, the river’s comeback is remarkable.But now that the industrial pollution has all but ended, a new threat sullies the river, one that comes from the outlying towns and suburbs.Bacterial pollution from failing septic systems, agricultural runoff and sewage overflows in the suburbs adds more bacteria to both the Buffalo River and Scajaquada Creek than anything Buffalo’s sewer system adds to those waterways, researchers have found. Buffalo, however, is where these pollutants land, and the city finds itself across the table from both state and federal environmental officials demanding a cleanup...........
But what surprised scientists who studied the river is that more bacteria enter the Buffalo River from the suburbs and rural areas than from all of Buffalo’s combined sewer overflows.  Upstream pollutants from Buffalo Creek, Cayuga Creek and Cazenovia Creek were 125 percent to 750 percent greater than what city’s combined sewer overflows add to the river, according to Kim Irvine, a geology professor at Buffalo State College who studied the river with his colleagues.  The bacteria came not only from 17 other combined sewer overflows from outside the city, but from failing suburban septic systems and AGRICULTURAL RUNOFF.