Earth Changes
In the 7pm incident, Mohd Khairon Fazdli Md Isa, 27, a heavy machine operator, was playing with friends at the field when the lightning struck.
Four persons, including a woman, died at two places in Ganjam district. One person died at Tilisingi under Bhanjanagar police limits while three of a family died in Keshpur under Khallikote police limits when lightning struck.
In Parlakhemundi, one person died and four others were injured in Zagili Street under Ward no 1 under Parlakhemundi municipality. The deceased has been identified as T Sabara Raju of the same area.
"When troops were gathered for the training at the training camp in Katukaleyawa in Polonnaruwa, all of a sudden lightning struck the place and four soldiers were killed and 59 injured," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.
Steve DiMarco, associate professor in Texas A&M's College of Geosciences who has studied dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico for more than 15 years, believes the dead zone area off the Texas coast extends from the Texas-Louisiana border area to Brownsville. A dead zone occurs when there is hypoxia, or oxygen-depleted water.
Such low levels of oxygen are believed to be caused by pollution from farm fertilizers as they empty into rivers and eventually the Gulf, or by soil erosion or discharge from sewage treatment plants.
"Not all of the area from the Texas-Louisiana coast to Brownsville is a dead zone area, but very much of it is," DiMarco explains. "The Texas dead zone appears to be more patchy and not as continuous as the Louisiana dead zone to the east, but much of the region there has very low oxygen levels, some extremely low."
Last fall he sent 155 semitrailer trucks to California loaded with hives containing bees fit and ready to pollinate the almond crop.
"We lost 40% of the hives we sent there. We sent 70,000 out and lost 28,000," said Adee, whose Adee Honey Farms in Bruce is considered the largest beekeeping operation in the nation.
"I would say overall the losses of South Dakota bees - from what I've heard - from what they started in the spring of '07 until they came out of the almonds is at least 50%. It's not good."
Now, in preparation for the honey-making season in South Dakota, he's working to get back to full strength from a mystery called colony collapse disorder.