The fishkill on Georgia’s Ogeechee River

For a dwindling rural White population, however, there still exists an older South, where in their own minds, those forests and rivers are extensions of the people who know and love them best; where battles must be fought to defend the land against insult and violation; and where it seems likely that this war, too, like that other one of 150 years ago, will end in humiliating defeat.

This story was orginally published on February 28, 2017. We are reposting to mark the release of John Wolfe's story, "Part of the river: Anger and uncertainty after decades of drinking water contamination."

To get a sense of the Ogeechee River in eastern Georgia, imagine twisty channels of coffee-colored water, inching past cypress trees draped in gray moss and under the occasional bridge. In many spots, the Ogeechee has the quality of a primordial Earth, where life forms are slowly evolving into the flora and fauna of today. Now imagine the same river not teeming with life but full of dead fish — 40,000 fish, mysteriously belly-up. Their carcasses, many pockmarked with lesions, line its banks, circle slowly in eddies, and pile up against fallen trees.

At 2:30 P.M. on Friday, May 20, 2011, headquarters phoned Tim Barrett to report that a citizen had seen some dead fish in the Ogeechee. Barrett was a biologist working for the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division. He climbed into his truck, buckled up, and got to work. And from a distance, at least, what happened in the next hours, days, weeks, and months would look familiar to anyone who has been in a movie theater in the last 30 years.

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