this is all here for a check of the headlines at half past the hour. tensions mount as part of his rally and palestinian officials criticized president obama's latest proposals for peace between the two and the future of the region as a whole. the u.s. engagement and levy opposes a sixty day american legal deadline without still look for evil but not the president nor congress some daughters board and obama says the country's military involvement is not only to. thousands of protesters take to georgia cities to

demand president saakashvili his resignation with reports police have fired up to have trade kuning fears a repeat of previous and violent take france take the eggs. and right now we take you to the u.s. state of louisiana where water pollution is the disastrous cost of doing business with us part of this special report is up next. thirty five years ago wilma helped identify a toxic that 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 resources. we know that it's being caused by runoff in the midwest. the midwest has been growing

more corn and walk on requires a heavy a fertile cause a lot of. every you nine hundred thousand tons of agricultural fertilizer washes into the mississippi river from thirty one states outside the museum. as the river moves through the louisiana it brings all those nutrients down with it and it causes algae blooms which use up the oxygen and cause what's called a dead stop and slow are no. 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 the whole united states but it's only quote impacting the economic base along the coastal areas.

occasionally i feel the food and music i think of one 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 petro chemicals made in the united states. it's known as cancer alley. the boy when i brought my son michael holmes from the hospital they tell me he might be blind deaf or brain damage but certainly more the more susceptible cerebral palsy and more susceptible to respiratory infections ammonia etc. and then i realize that the error was in not attaining 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 was a 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. going to die. so i think there's nothing like a mother's instinct that's what's missing is 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. lidia's louisiana marman action network and we've been working on public health and protecting natural resources for twenty three years. we're on our way to exxon

mobil to the largest petrochemical to sillett in united states. petrochemical companies in the easy. killing 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 ruins people's lives literally because they aren't obey him along. with. a camel for which i mean when he would come home in his clothes would smell it tells children that was a small money. yes it is jobs but we care about the workers to need to have a safe job. it is hard when people are worried you know where's my next paycheck and upon from my paycheck is coming from my company we are very at 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 wife shot 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 who made a lot of attacks what you really know is they're not really talking about the substance of what you're saying here 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 used 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 grandmas and people become more aware about the environment. the more people that have 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 asked me when they're dying that i'm not forget the day they were here and they were important and so. with the least i can do is try to help. mean. you have to bring yourself back to why are you doing this and for me it's helping people and believe in that service is the ran i pay for the space i take up

on earth i believe that i owe something back and if the songs 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 true vases. by ten thousand mile web of oil and gas pipelines crisscrosses and wheezy on his weapon lands. today many of those pipelines and their infrastructures i banned. 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 or not even people their corporations their legal lance cities in i don't think you can let somebody intimidate. much of the abandoned oil and gas infrastructure was initially built on land. but due to rows and storms or misguided attempts to control the mississippi river much of it is now surrounded by water. not only others can now say they built it to access the on the first place just drawing over wetlands there are constantly or spills 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 old 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 the nets or shreds and nets all up. and. every bit of the spencers that are in the net water in the guise of tradition like 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 collapsed. i am the people who work live off of these natural resources it's for work but it's all also keeps you connected is still family oriented you take your kids along when

they're young when you're working you keep i'm with you on the boats and they go to work at the end of trade and they can take care of a family or had they need to move past. you know so it's real tight knit. and all the money that they are stays within the community and the money goes to the dogs in the boats for the motors for their nets and boat 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 in this country and realize what they're losing when they lose this asteroid system here hopefully. 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 as oil and gas industry generates more than seventy billion dollars per year and employs three hundred twenty thousand people if you look around resenting you 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 road 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 have left and to me that's the real crime here is that we had all this wonderful all these wonderful resources and the people got very little of that. every day six thousand workers shuttled by helicopter from soda to boil rakes in the gulf of mexico. they used to provide forty percent right 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 some point those lines cross in louisiana is a net loser because of having oil and gas development they still provide some jobs but the orleans tree is about three percent of our jobs just not a big 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 oil industry which is where they drilled the well and wheezy and they probably drilled a hundred thousand of them they would also. just hold the ground and then these pits they would put these waste water. verify it's all these things they use in the oil and gas industry it's got hydrocarbons in it like oil it's got heavy metals we find arsenic around these wells a lot and it's got was called produced water it 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 it would just push the little bit in with a little dirt over but the landowners left with this massive waste which then seeps down the groundwater and there's a hundred thousand of these out there and many of those 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 seen reports from the thirty's and say. if you put salt water in these online it's going to leak down the groundwater they continue doing louisiana until late eighty's. finally now they're supposed to line their goods but will last faith in the nation to do it and it's really too late many cases. two decades ago paul helped to write some of the c.n.n.

strongest environmental laws. which coil and gas companies fiercely opposed. corruption is probably the biggest problem money and politics corruption is to people think of in terms also mine is going to pay off 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's no longer works for the people it it's what. political scientists call client capture agency becomes captured by the group that's supposed to be regulated and then the agency serves a group and it doesn't serve the public anymore the good people leave because they don't want to work and that kind of environment and you're left with a 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 want to take first look at the regulations and then they would edit them and i was on from that program because the management program over that. drill baby drill. right here. yes we must drill out sure 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 since the day 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 and draw mention effects of this will be very very modest with story full the message disruption is cool so the lights and you know we there's no one who wants this thing i think more than i do you know i'd love my life back. we used to identify louisiana creek to train in rita and post katrina and rita and

now it's pretty spill and post gallup we feel like life as we know it is changed forever. it's just unbelievably bad when they wanted to stop burning the heavy portion of it we had don't insist that it only be burned when the winds were moving offshore. it was making an error saw the hydrocarbons it was moving on shore way ahead of the spill and making people very very sick given the headaches for three precious burning eyes and just disrupting life all around the coastal areas. this is the last thing we need we've got a hurricane season approaching this is the tommy year when you know we've got a lot of birds breeding out on the baryons and in the way tens of fish will all be

another marine log be a starting to enter the buy in is trees most marine oldham isms when they come into an oil slick the instincts don't tell them how to react because it's not a natural phenomenon of folding. it's just going to live out these coastal communities as we know it because there will not be a mechanism for them to earn a living on the natural resources and the e.c.f. . we really believe that there are 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 no rain is the charter captives the commercial fisherman and nobody can do anything 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 drives the state committees like natural resources in our legislature headed up by exxon executives and people. like that it's all industry ultimately choose the ruling elites who run the e.c.m. . 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 and which is ban accounts certainly is bad environmentally. b.p.s. it falls to old songs ocean 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 are they getting the oil is we demand it and they can still make money from. b.p. oil it's on a river us is not going to go drill and one mile deep water it's like all my money . but they can make money because all policy. they're gonna keep drilling and it's gonna happen again. the industry is going to change the federal agencies my tighten up sometime in the foods not to me but while

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 are very tenacious we love where we live and we think well we live here it's our duty to protect that 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 issue v it happened to be just today they lifted a car running small i went into the store there when the still probably fifteen to twenty minutes and the reason being says they call with syria wouldn't get. well 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 was killed louisiana oil was being sold to cheat to the rest of the nation his idea was well we'll shut down the pipelines and his slogan was let them freeze in the dog and it's all something like that have to swear with the u.s. has to freeze in the dark i don't see a change in our energy policy and they feel no real change in the desire to go deeper into the oil.

more than a month. in one of the most extreme environments on the planet this is and charge it up and people have to be aware that they are far away from civilization and showing thomas discovers faults makes sense article is so special and attractive for many wildlife in antarctica it is the boat and friends of. the expedition to the bottom of the earth artsy.