be aware that they are far away from civilization sean thomas discovers part makes science articles so special and destructive for many life in antarctica is both you and the. expedition to the bottom of the earth on our team. this is our team from moscow it's kevin owen here with you on the hof our headlines about this tonight israel and the us stumble over palestine netanyahu rejects president obama's proposals on the middle east netanyahu says the u.s. indorsement of a palestinian state built on israel's one hundred sixty seven boundaries would leave the jewish state indefensible. the u.s. action in libya passes its sixty day deadline without congressional approval which makes the campaign now formally illegal for

a few on capitol hill of the white house seemed to be. thousands of protesters take to georgian cities to demand president saakashvili that resignation reports the police have fired the demonstrators are fueling fears of a repeat of previous violent confrontations could take place. now we take you to the u.s. state of louisiana next where water pollution is the disastrous cost of doing business we present the second part of the special report we've got for you. thirty five years ago wilma helped identify a toxic debt some suffocating marine life in the gulf of mexico the dead cell is all encompassing it's along the mississippi river it's in the gulf the dead zone has a huge impact on all the coastal areas where you have the fisheries researchers say . we know that it's being caused by runoff in the midwest.

the midwest has been growing will kill more and more corn requires a heavy a fertile household. every you nine hundred thousand tons of agricultural fertilizer washes into the mississippi river from thirty one states outside. as the river moves through louisiana it brings all those nutrients down with it because algae blooms which use up the oxygen and cause what's called the dead stuff and slow no oxygen. makes sense from the mouth of the mississippi all the way into texas. no fish no crabs all the type of aquatic organisms that they normally catch so it's having an impact on how united states but it's only quote impacting the economic base along

the coastal areas. occasionally feel the food the music writing a lot of the richest places in the world but now natural resources are something that folks who've been in power have abused and neglected.

two hundred petrochemical plants line eighty five miles of the mississippi river between baton rouge and new orleans. they produce over twenty five percent of the petrochemicals made in the united states. it's known as cancer alley. the but. when i brought my son michael holmes from the hospital they told me he might be blind deaf or brain damaged and certainly more yet more sceptical cerebral palsy and more susceptible to respiratory infections and monia etc. and then i realized that the air was not attainment here meaning that it was unhealthy to breathe seventeen times that year the year that i brought him home i felt really like our basic civil rights are being violated that i wasn't certain when i opened up my window that i was getting clean air i wasn't certain that the

earth was clean i wasn't certain that the water that i was drinking was all right and i was terrified for my children. getting out. so i think there's nothing like a mother's instinct such misery something about that we already have to watch when our air quality is bad and then i realize the basic civic lesson that. i am that somebody. that's when i got involved i said i did this for six months and now is twenty something years ago. lean is louisiana my mental action network and we've been working on public health

and protecting natural resources for twenty three years. running our way to exxon mobil to the largest petrochemical facility in the united states. petro chemical companies in the easy. more than one hundred thousand people. there's a lot of folks who are good neighbors but there is this percentage of folks that are really bad neighbors and it really really innocent people's lives are literally because they aren't obeying the law. the worker told me when he would come home in his clothes would smell he tells children that was a small money. yes it is jobs but we care about the workers to have a safe job. it is hard when people are worried you know where's my next paycheck and

a come from my paycheck is coming from my company we are very a tune and try to help people who want to do something but they can only do so much and that and there's no judgment there i mean this is just to be about helping people and not not harming anybody. this is going to harm my job is going to harm my husband or a wife. or you know will my people in the community look at me differently or they think i'm a crazy environmentalist for a while people may have a lot of attacks what you really know is they're not really talking about the substance of what you're saying you're just trying to take attention off of the facts of what's really happening here trying to stereotype you and there's no stereotypical environmentalist anymore is to be a yogurt backpack and crunchy kind of people which i love which you obviously see i'm not now it's everybody's moms and dads and grandmothers and people become more aware about the environment. the more people that i've lost in my life in

this work the woman who started this work with me ramona was like my partner in this work she was another mother actually her husband was a worker at one of the chemical facilities she just wanted to live to be forty and she died at thirty nine of cancer. when someone asks me when they're dying that i'm not forget the day they were here and they were important and so. at least i can do is try to help. i mean. you have to bring yourself back to why are you doing this and for me it's

helping people and believe in net service is the ran i pay for the space i take up on earth i believe that i owe something back and if a song i can talk and walk on i want to help i mean it's life is just about getting through life. but. i'm not pessimistic because if i got pessimistic i would put doing what i'm doing and just give up and i don't think

that we can do that and. these things are just happening here and moving somewhere else that's not how it works it's everywhere. because of. this mentality of better living with chemistry that we have in soho but it's everywhere it's pervasive. a ten thousand mile web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrosses louisiana's wetlands . today many of those pipelines and their infrastructures i bend. my father was military. and when you grow up i think in

a household and that environment you learn that you have a responsibility to do the right thing for other people not just you know their companies. they're not even people they're corporations they're legal entities and i don't think you can let somebody intimidate you. much of the abandoned oil and gas infrastructure was initially built on land. but due to erosion storms or misguided attempts to control the mississippi river much of it is now surrounded by watching. not only others can now say they built to access the on the first place just drawing all the wetlands there are constantly or else feels something or leaks out here and when they get done with it it's just there and it's all on the bottom may have all the

pipes on the bottom whatever they aren't using they throw overboard the only people that ever see that is a fisherman who work the bottom are shrimpers the skimmer boats because they run into it and skimming or in their nets or shreds their nets all up. and. every bit of the spaces that are in that water and this does have traditionally fish crab and fin fish and shrimp out here there's less of it for them to catch. the habitat destruction that is occurring if you took every fisherman out of the water and you don't do something about that water quality and the habitat protecting the habitat that the fisheries needs it's going to collapse . i and the people who work live off of these natural resources it's the fourth one that it's also

keeps you connected is real family oriented you take your kids along when they're young when you're working you keep them with you on the boat and they go to. work for the learn a trade and they can take care of a family or hand in need to move past. the now so it's real tight now. and on the money that they earn stays within the community and the money goes to the docks in the boats for the notice for their nets and hope builders you know and it sustains the community as a whole. this is a national treasure and it really is people need to wake up a news conference and realize what they're losing they lose business to our system here in coastal louisiana.

when we lose assess to larry the gulf of mexico fisheries are going to collapse because. this is where those pieces were. when i started i had the optimism of the young and i thought that if you point out a problem things will change well it doesn't work that way you've got to really work at it to make things change. million is oil and gas industry generates more than seventy billion dollars per year and employs three hundred twenty thousand people if you look around rees yannis say well i had all this oil and gas obviously everybody here must be well off and incomes must be high and the road system must be great none of that is true

their root system schools are in trouble all the time there's no money for the public services the state's always in a fiscal problem. and yet billions of dollars of oil and gas were removed from the state and our per capita income is among the lowest in the country our poverty rates highest next to mississippi thank god for mississippi so we don't have to be last in everything and so we don't have much to show for it except the waste that they left and to me that's the real crime here is that you had all this wonderful all these wonderful resources and the people got very little of it. every day six thousand workers shadowed by helicopter from soda to oil rigs in the gulf of mexico.

they used to provide forty percent of our tax base now they provide maybe fifteen ten or fifteen percent so there's much less so the benefits coming in have gone down over the year and the impacts have gone up so that some point those lines cross in louisiana is a net loser because of having oil and gas development based over by some jobs with orleans three is about three percent of our jobs just enough to be a part of our job base and. their pride became a problem say in one thousand nine hundred nineteen thirties people began to notice that the waste from the orleans three which is wherever they drilled the well and wheezy on and they probably drilled a hundred thousand them they would also. have just a whole new ground and then these pits they would put these waste water zubair rights all these things they use in the oil and gas industry it's got hydrocarbons in it like oil it's got heavy metals refine our snake around these wells

a lot and it's got was called produced water comes up with the oil three four times the salinity of seawater dumped on the ground it kills everything it touches so it would kill off all these little valleys and creek beds and streams and so when they left the lease they would just push the little bit in a little dirt over but the landowners left with this massive waste which then seeps down to the ground water and there's a hundred thousand of these out there and many of the still leaking landowners are just finally learning about them so it's another one of those legacies and. they knew that these pits were going to leak out scene reports from the thirty's and say . if you put salt water in these online pits is going to leak down the groundwater they continue doing louisiana until the late eighty's. finally now they're supposed to lie on their page but we will last eight in the nation to do it and it's really too late many cases.

two decades ago paul helped to write some of the cns strongest environmental law firms. which coil and gas companies fiercely opposed. corruption is probably the biggest problem money and politics corruption is fifty people think of in terms also might get a payoff that's part of it but it's goes much deeper than that once you begin to change the way an agency does its business once that happens then the whole agency begins to change and it no longer works for the people it's what. political scientists call client after agency becomes captured by the group it's supposed to be regulated and then the agency serves i group and it doesn't serve the public anymore the good people leave because they don't want to work in that kind of environment and you're left with the sort of dead in the water agency and we have

a number of those movies you know. even if you got the law in place industry has had a big say in writing those rules they won't take first look at the regulations and then they would edit them and i was on from that program that goes to management program over that. drill baby drill. i hear. yes we must drill offshore oil yes we need conservation alternative fuels nuclear and many other things we also need more domestic production you can come off the coast of louisiana see how we're doing with the most modern technology so today we're announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration my administration will consider potential areas for development in the mid and south

atlantic and the gulf of mexico. everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall in drawing my sleeve so this will be very very modest with story full of a message disruption is close to life and you know we there's no one who wants this thing and to move it only to you know i love my lifetime.

we used to identify louisiana pre-k. train and rita and post katrina and rita and now it's pretty spill and poster girl feel like life as we know it has changed forever. it's just unbelievably bad. when they want to stop burning the heavy portion of it we had to insist that it only be burned one of the winds were moving offshore. it was making an error saw of the hydrocarbons it was moving on shore way ahead of the spill and making people very very sick given the headaches vomiting pressures burning eyes and just disrupting life all along the coastal areas. this is the last thing we need we've got a hurricane season approaching this is the time a year when you know we've got a lot of birds breeding out on the baryons and in the weight bands the fish will

all be another marine all via study into into the by an ace trees most marine over listens when they come into an oil slick the instincts don't tell them how to react because it's not a natural phenomenon folding. it's just going to wipe out these coastal communities as we know it because they will not be a mechanism for them to earn a living on the natural resources and what we see happening. we really believed that there were not failsafe measures in place on those rigs that ecological disaster of this size could happen. this is something totally different this is something that they can't control they don't know how to control it it's just heartbreaking in a fury that our legislators really lacks the rules and allowed them to do this when

they didn't have the technology to take care of it or something like this happen. what they've done here is wiped out these coastal communities put us all out of business and the rain is the charter captains the commercial fisherman nobody can do anything nobody can go to work. they're angry and they're scared. everybody is like shell shocked and nobody knows what to do. how do you recover everything that you've lost. the oil industry is completely gracia the state committees like natural resources in our legislature headed up by exxon executives and people. like that it's the oil industry ultimately choose the ruling elites who run lucianne.

it's one of the costs of oil that's never figured into the price of oil which is why gasoline is so cheap because we don't put all the costs in we just ban accounts and certainly has been environmentally. d.p.'s it falls tolls fund social because it's the equipment that failed but we americans shit a fair amount of the blame. most of us on the nile about the whole energy situation the reason they're out there getting the oil is we demand it and they can still make money on. b.p. oil it's on a river us is not going to go drill in one mile deep water it's like on my money. but they can make money because all energy policy. they're gonna keep drilling and it's gonna happen again the industry change the

federal agencies my writing up sometime in there be fools not to but all industry is pretty powerful i'm sure they're up there lobbying in the halls of legislature in the halls of the agency every day every hour. we don't give up very tenacious we love where we live and we think well we live here it's our duty to protect our environment protect our communities and so i'm just so sorry that i live to see this. this should be a giant wake up call for all of us were addicted to oil. i saw somebody yesterday i go into a stall and i was driving a big huge is should be attempting to be fired but just today they left their car

running small they went into the store then ran the still probably fifteen to twenty minutes and the reason being says they call with syria wouldn't get. as long as we have that sort of attitude we're going to have to go offshore to foreign oil and we're going to have more of these sorts of accidents. one of our former governor of louisiana oil has been sold to chief to the rest of the nation his idea was well we'll shut down the power lines and his slogan was let them freeze in the dark. and it's all something like that have to swear with the u.s. has to freeze in the dog i don't see a change and i energy policy and they will no real change in a desire to go deeper and be hopeful.

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