Toxic water rising below Johannesburg

[CLANG]

Source: http://www.latimes.com

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa —
The spring, just over 20 miles northwest of Johannesburg, flows blood red.

It is toxic, highly acidic and full of heavy metals, so nasty that newly weaned impala and other animals in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve downstream can't drink the water — and some of them die of thirst.

The water, a poisonous legacy of the gold mining industry, is dead. Not one living organism survives in it.

Millions of gallons of the same kind of toxic water lie underneath Johannesburg, a city of nearly 4 million people, and it's rising 50 feet a month.

The technical term is acid mine drainage. If nothing is done, subterranean parking garages will fill with the toxic red water in about two years' time. Tunnels for electrical cables and underground railway stations will flood. And unnatural crimson streams will spring from the ground across the suburbs to the east of Johannesburg as the rising water escapes.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-south-africa-water-20101126,0,807151.story

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Man is destroying his habitat all over the planet. This is just tragic.

[Taverner]

1. Total reversal of the "don't shit where you eat" meme

[juajen]

2. I wont buy gulf shrimp or fish. It breaks my heart to know how

we have let money buy us. The state of Louisiana bows down to oil interests, as do all of the oil states in this country, and, it it's not justoil, it's gold, or silver, or whatever the corporatists want to tear down to built their empires all over the world. We are doomed, but I will forever pray for some kind of intervention. I am an optimist.

[Poll_Blind]

3. Well that's like Johannesburg dies, then. It's not like THAT's going to be the new Venice.

PB

[tabatha]

4. Here is a video about the problem

http://www.mg.co.za/multimedia/2010-11-24-a-ticking-bomb

[tabasco]

5. It's amazing how badly life sucks

when you don't have drinking water.