One of the worst pollution incidents in recent times has seen 4.5million fish die in a day.
Lake Cajitalan in Mexico is normally a bustling area with fishermen and tourists but it turned into a sea of corpses as fish began to go belly-up.
For days, the smell of rotting scales lingered in the air as locals joined government workers to scoop up more than 156 tons of freshwater popoche chub, a sardine-sized species native to the western state of Jalisco.
It’s still unclear what killed the fish, but the incident was the worst in a spate of environmental disasters in Mexico this year. Early last month, a river in the northern state of Sonora took on a sickly brown-red color after workers from a nearby mine dumped thousands of gallons of sulfuric acid into the water. In Veracruz state, near the Gulf of Mexico, a gasoline spill contaminated almost 5 miles of a small river near the town of Tierra Blanca. And last Thursday, the Pacific coast of Sinaloa state also saw a sudden and seemingly inexplicable mountain of dead fish rise to the surface.
TF_geepster.
