WORLD> America
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WORLD> America
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Flood victims worry: What's in the water?
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-06-17 17:07 The flooding also raised concerns of contamination in rural wells, said G. Richard Olds, professor and chairman of the Medical College of Wisconsin. "For rural folks, it's going to be hard to know if their water's safe or not," he said. In addition to the poison in the water, there are mosquitoes -- millions of them spawning in acres of standing water. Greg Burg, assistant director of undergraduate biology at the University of Kansas, said the flooding "adds that much more water where they could potentially lay eggs and have the eggs survive." Business was already heating up at Mosquito Control, a Rolfe, Iowa-based company that sprays insecticide from a crop-duster airplane. "We are already getting several calls that mosquitoes that have finally hatched," co-owner Rich Welter said. "We're hearing from folks around Cedar Rapids and all around the northern half of Iowa." When the waters rose Sunday in Oakville, a town of 400, Lanz and his family tried to move their pigs out of harm's way. But they could only save a few. Most of their 350 sows and their 800 piglets were lost. The family ripped out canvas ventilation curtains in the barn so the pigs "could at least have a chance," said Logan Lanz, Bob Lanz' grandson. "They were screaming. They were on top of each other. We had some big sows in there. They're frantic, and they run you over." He said the water was choked with dead piglets. Near Iowa City, Angela Betts and her three children were among those who fled last week when the Iowa River burst through a levee at Coralville. She stayed just long enough to fill two trash bags with clothes. The family is now living in a shelter, and as far as Betts is concerned, everything she left behind can stay there. "It bothers me, with everything that's in the water," she said. "I probably won't keep anything. It won't be worth it." |
