'Dead zone' reckoning

A "dead zone" the size of Massachusetts formed last summer in the Gulf of Mexico off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas.

No marine life survived in the area, which encompassed 7,900 square miles.

A dead zone will occur this summer in that part of the Gulf, too, just as a dead zone has formed there for the past 40 summers, scientists say.

As waters warm each year, thick algal blooms are fed by nitrogen and phosphorus in rivers that empty into the Gulf. When the algal blooms die and decompose, much of the northwestern Gulf becomes depleted of oxygen and, thus, marine life.

Year after year, Congress takes the Gulf's huge dead zone for granted.

That is unacceptable -- and so is the curious wavering of an intergovernmental task force formed to study the dead zone and make recommendations.

'Extremely important'

Last fall, the task force, led by the Environmental Protection Agency, issued a draft report that called the dead zone an "extremely important" problem that could become harder to fix if it is not substantially reduced in size. The draft warned that "long-term, ecological changes in species diversity" might occur.

Yet, the final report, set for release in June, is not expected to call for significant action or sufficient congressional funding to reduce the dead zone, the magazine Environmental Science & Technology reported last week. Instead, the report is expected to recommend that various federal agencies take the lead in addressing the problem.

But the federal government doesn't need to reroute this "extremely important" issue through the bureaucracy. It needs to find the will and the wherewithal to attack it.

Scientists have documented that the Gulf dead zone is largely a product of fertilizer nutrients that wash off Midwest farmlands and into the Mississippi, which carries them to the Gulf. Discharges from sewage treatment plants and factories also contain phosphorus and nitrogen, research shows.

Last fall's draft report said that, although progress has been made in reducing pollution by farms and industry, the impact has not been large enough to reduce the size of the dead zone.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is working to get Congress to provide funding to combat the dead zone, one of the senator's staff members told Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

Floridians concerned about the health of the Gulf -- a dead zone attributed primarily to red tide formed off Florida's west coast in 2005 -- should encourage their members of Congress to join with Landrieu and push hard for the funding.

Congress should also ask why the intergovernmental task force will apparently not call for a major effort to reduce or eliminate the dead zone.

The Gulf's health is too important for Congress or the administration to ignore.

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