Minnesota dam breach released 12 million cubic yards of poisonous sediment

This blog has covered waterway impairment in South Dakota since 2010 while watching as contamination from mining, industrial agriculture, coal burning and livestock pollution steadily worsens across the entire state in nearly every stream and lake. 

But, the death of the Missouri River ecosystem in South Dakota began with the European invasion, was accelerated by industrial agriculture and sealed with the construction of the main stem dams. Because of ag chemicals South Dakota led the US in breast cancer rates in 2016 but now Iowa has taken the lead in that infamous development.  

The Mississippi is the third most polluted waterway in the United States and six of the tributaries of the Minnesota and Mississippi River system rise in South Dakota where Big Stone Lake is filling with poisonous silt. The amount of lethal sediment behind the Oahe Dam is likely billions of cubic yards and the US Army Corps of Engineers counts almost 90,000 dams in its database as the federal government acknowledges and assesses the harm dams have caused to Native communities. 

Recall one of South Dakota's Earth hating former governors built a house in a swamp that flooded then received a generous self-reimbursement from insurance coverage underwritten by his own company knowing Lake Sharpe is filling with silt. Lewis and Clark Lake in southeastern South Dakota is thirty percent full of toxic sediment while Republicans and their toadies cry government overreach and waters of the United States or WOTUS architects regroup for another round in Congress.

More than a century's worth of sediment was unleashed downstream into the Blue Earth River after the partial failure of the Rapidan Dam last week. There was an estimated 11.6 million cubic yards of sediment behind the dam. And it was high in phosphorus and nitrogen because of nearby agricultural runoff. [Rapidan Dam partial failure sent more than a century’s worth of sediment pollution downstream]

We all know South Dakota is a perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area even as the Heritage Foundation works to install a Republican executive at any cost and the corrupted Supreme Court of the United States guts environmental protections.