U.S. Water News Online
RIDGELY, Tenn. -- The Mississippi River is so well known internationally that New Guinea tribal leaders on a recent tour of the United States made a special stop at a Rosedale, Miss., landing so they could touch it.
But despite it's popularity abroad, many folks who live near the river don't know a lot about it, adhering instead to misconceptions about a body of water European explorer Hernando DeSoto first saw 465 years ago.
"People all over the world know about the Mississippi River," said Earl Willoughby, president of the Dyer County (Tenn.) Historical Society. "You overlook things that you are close to."
However, several initiatives are being planned to help area residents rediscover the river.
One is a plan encompassing Shelby County and other areas of West Tennessee that would be part of Mississippi River Natural and Recreational Corridor. It's intended to conserve the river's natural setting while developing new ways for people to enjoy it.
At the same time, an interstate group known as the Lower Mississippi River Conservation Committee has begun work on scores of projects from Louisiana to Missouri designed to restore the aquatic habitat lost or damaged through federal flood-control and navigation work.
And groups such as the American Land Conservancy are helping states buy land along the Mississippi for conservation and recreation. The conservancy is partnering to develop a "fishing and boating trail" stretching along the river from near St. Louis to South Mississippi.
Conservationists say such initiatives are important because area residents need to realize what an economic and natural marvel they have in their midst.
Stand at any point at the Memphis waterfront, and even at extremely low stages, at least 90 million gallons -- enough to fill 136 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- will pass by every minute.
On any given day, the water pulsates with an array of activities that can range from fishing tournaments to adventurers' trips to scientific studies to barge traffic serving heavy industry.
The most noticeable of the activities is commerce.
The 17 million tons of cargo handled in Memphis port facilities each year include the coal used to generate most of the city's electricity, petroleum products for vehicles and steel and concrete for construction.
"The river affects most people's daily life every day," said George Leavell, vice president of Wepfer Marine in Memphis.
Even amid all the industrial shipping, however, the Mississippi remains a corridor of unusual natural richness.
Not only do one-quarter of North America's fish thrive in the Mississippi, their population densities -- measured in terms of pounds per acre -- can exceed by 10 times those of area reservoirs.
The Mississippi also envelops one of the Earth's great migratory flyways. Some 60 percent of the continent's birds -- everything from white pelicans to purple martins -- move up and down it.
Between the levees, the sandbars and forests that make up a 2.8 million-acre primeval wilderness running from Cairo, Ill., to the Gulf provide shelter for terns, herons, beavers, otters, deer and an assortment of other wildlife.
"It's an internal wilderness is what it is. It's wonderful," said David Etnier, who, as professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, often took students on sampling and camping trips on the Mississippi.
"There are miles and miles of sand beaches that are just beautiful in the late summer and early fall. From the Kentucky border to Vicksburg (Miss.) you hardly see a house, a telephone pole, anything."
Besides not being knowledgeable about the river, many area residents have misconceptions about it.
"The two big attitudes are that it's nasty and that it's dangerous," said Richard Ingram, chief of the water-quality technical section of the Lower Mississippi River Conservation Committee.
However, experts and government studies show fears about pollution and danger are largely overblown.
The Mississippi does absorb fertilizers and pesticides from the nation's agricultural heartland, as well as the effluent of more than 30,000 wastewater-treatment plants from the Carolinas to Montana. It also has had severe contamination issues in the past, including pesticide discharges from a Memphis plant that were blamed for massive fish kills during the 1960s.
But Phil Bass, state policy coordinator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Gulf of Mexico program, said the river today is cleaner than many other water bodies, especially the lakes and streams in its floodplain.
"I think it's the flushing that the river brings," he said.
Water-sampling conducted by The Commercial Appeal at sites upriver from Memphis and in front of the city's downtown area found relatively few problems. Of the more than 60 industrial chemicals and pesticides for which tests were run, none were detected in either location.
Both sites, however, registered high coliform bacteria levels -- although analysts said animal sources might have contributed.
Paul Hartfield, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the health of the fish speaks to the river's good water quality.
"I don't know that I've ever seen a diseased fish on the Mississippi River," he said.
Jack Killgore, a research fisheries biologist with the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, agreed that the river is healthy.
"I can't identify one single water-quality problem in the Mississippi River, and that definitely wasn't true 30 or 40 years ago," Killgore said.
As for danger, experts say one myth about the river is that it contains eddies that can swallow people and even boats.
Billy Curmano, a Rushford, Minn., performance artist who swam the entire length of the Mississippi over an 11-year period, said he encountered many eddies, but found they just spun him around on the surface, with little downward pull.
"When you come into an eddy, you don't fight it," he said.
Like any body of water, John P. Sheahan, vice president of the Tennessee Parks and Greenways Foundation, which is involved in the effort to establish the river corridor, said the Mississippi is safe if users respect it and are knowledgeable.
"It's like skiing down a mountain," Sheahan said. "Once you've been down with the instructor, you know where not to go."
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