Unified Interior Regions

Gaye S. Farris of Carencro, La., is the new national secretary of the National Association of Government Communicators, a national professional network of federal, state and local government employees who disseminate information within and outside government.

From the drastic impacts of major floods and droughts to more gradual shifts in channel, sandbar and floodplain habitats, large river systems such as the Missouri are always changing. Over the past century human activities also have caused physical and biological changes in such rivers.

The mysterious brain disease responsible for the deaths of bald eagles and American coots in Arkansas has now been found in two species of ducks discovered dead at Woodlake, North Carolina, and in bald eagles and coots from three other southeastern states.

Nutrients from the Mississippi River Basin are believed to be responsible, at least in part, for the large hypoxic zone that develops on the Louisiana-Texas shelf in the Gulf of Mexico each summer, according to Don Goolsby, a hydrologist with the U.S.Geological Survey in Denver, Colo.

Effective immediately, the Environmental and Contaminants Research Center, an environmental research facility of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Biological Resources Division (Central Region) located in Columbia, MO, was re-named the Columbia Environmental Research Center (CERC).

Heavy rainfall and flooding prompted an emergency response from USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) engineers and field technicians to keep stream gages operational during and after Hurricane Georges. Personnel from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are working to secure gages threatened by rising rivers and streams or damaged by the storm. Some gaging stations monitored by the USGS are used

Aerial flights on Tuesday, two days after Hurricane Georges hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, revealed what one scientist called the worst damage to the Chandeleur Islands that he had seen in more than a decade.

Hurricane Georges extensively damaged the Chandeleur Islands, barrier islands approximately 60 miles east of New Orleans and 30 miles south of Biloxi, Mississippi. These islands are the first line of storm defense for eastern Louisiana, especially New Orleans, and western Mississippi.

A mysterious disease that has killed bald eagles and American coots in southwest Arkansas may now be present in two other states, according to wildlife disease specialists at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

A minor earthquake with a magnitude of 3.8 occurred near Jonesboro, Ark., early Wednesday afternoon (September 17), according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo.

The gasoline additive MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether) was detected in some urban stormwater samples collected in 16 cities and metropolitan areas by the U.S. Geological Survey, but all detections of MTBE were less than the lower limit of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s draft lifetime health advisory for drinking water.