Word: shasta
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...brush, threatening a score of scenic small towns, once made famous by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and forcing nearly 14,000 residents to flee. Nearly 4,000 fire fighters labored throughout the week, bringing the flames under control just as another wildfire broke out in Northern California's Shasta County...
...state's commercial Chinook salmon catch depends on the estuary, but more than half the salmon swimming up the Sacramento River to lay eggs are blocked by the Red Bluff Diversion Dam. Those that get by are often unable to spawn in overheated waters coming from drought-stricken Shasta Lake. The San Joaquin River is entirely diverted for irrigation as it emerges from the Sierra Nevada. When it resumes downstream near the Kesterson Reservoir, selenium-poisoned waters flow into it from the Westlands agricultural district...
...wound through the canyons southwest of Mount Shasta, 60 miles below the Oregon border, the Sacramento River was a babbling stream, rugged enough to attract kayakers, yet so pristine that it supported a thriving population of blue-ribbon trout. Each year the 45-mile stretch of river lured thousands of anglers and tourists, drawn by the bucolic setting and the reputation of its native rainbows and browns...
...watched in horror, a 10-mile lime green plume of death drifted slowly down the river, wiping out most of the ecosystem -- aquatic plants, nymphs, caddis flies, mayflies and at least 100,000 trout. Even more alarming to Californians was that the spill occurred 27 miles upstream of Lake Shasta, the state's largest man-made reservoir...
Fortunately, the long-term threat to humans is probably minimal. Lake Shasta holds 550 billion gal. of water and should easily absorb the spill. Health officials say the water is safe to drink. But the incident served as a reminder that no one living in a modern industrial society is safe from an environmental catastrophe like the one that befell the Sacramento. Each year more than 1.5 million carloads of poisons, solvents, pesticides and other hazardous materials are hauled across the U.S. by train. Given the sheer volume of traffic, accidental chemical releases are inevitable, and they occur...