Counting the Cost - 22,710

A broken pipe, a valve turned in error and twenty-two thousand trout are dead. An update on the recent Davidson River fish kill via BlueRidgeNow.com reports:

State environmental officials also say the fish were killed not only by oxygen being depleted from the water, as federal officials originally said, but also from direct contact with acute concentrations of toxic chemicals.

Officials of the N.C. Department of Public Health initially identified the pollutant which spilled into the river from the shuttered Ecusta paper mill as sodium hydrosulfide, a caustic compound used during decades of paper making.