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The Fox River described here is a river in the northeast quadrant of the State Of Wisconsin in the United States . It is one of two completely separate rivers in Wisconsin named "Fox River". The Fox River of northeast Wisconsin flows from central Wisconsin through Lake Winnebago into the Bay Of Green Bay . Green Bay is part of Lake Michigan , the second largest of the five Great Lakes . The Fox River features a total length of 322km when the Upper Fox River tributary is included. The most common reference today is to what geographers call the "Lower Fox River." This is a stretch of the Fox about 64km long when measured from its outlet at Lake Winnebago . The Fox River has a second major tributary named the Wolf River . A common folklore in Wisconsin today is that the Fox River is one of few major rivers in the world that flows north. This is not true, as can be verified by examining any atlas. However, this myth is often the first "fact" about the river that local youngsters learn from adults wanting to impress them. There is no known record of when or where this geomyth originated. The Fox-Wolf watershed drains an area of about 16,650 km², with a discharge rate of 117 cubic meters per second into the Bay Of Green Bay . There are currently 12 dams and 17 Lock s on the Lower Fox river. The river drops about 50 meters in the 64 km section of the river out of Lake Winnebago. Prior to the construction of European-style dams after 1850, the river had many sizable rapids. The largest tributary to the Lower Fox River is called the East River which enters into the Fox River a few kilometers south of the mouth of the bay. The East River is more heavily polluted in terms of nutrients and suspended solids than is the Lower Fox. A popular, documented story about the East River is that "it was so polluted, it caught fire." More accurately, flammable industrial liquids floating on its surface caught fire at least twice in the period 1940-60. After the U.S. Clean Water Act amendments of 1972, the control of industrial and commercial discharges was improved substantially, and fires have not been reported since. Today, the major focus of government water regulation is on Runoff from land used for agriculture or urban settlement. CULTURE Prior to European settlement in the late 1600s, the shores of the Fox River and Green Bay were home to roughly half the 25,000 Native Americans who lived in what is today the State Of Wisconsin . Early French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet portaged from this river to the Wisconsin River and then to the Mississippi River during the French Colonization Of The Americas . The French-Canadian men who established homes on the Fox River married First Nation women, producing a mixed-blood population similar to the Metis of Canada. According to the Wisconsin Paper Council, the Lower Fox River has the highest concentration of Pulp and Paper Mill s in the world. While not officially designated a U.S. Superfund site, the Lower Fox River bottom has many parts heavily contaminated with toxic chemicals. These Contaminated Sediments are the river's most widely-known environmental problem. At the instigation of local Environmentalists , the issue remains in 2006 a topic of lively, often heated debate. Involved in the debate are the paper industry executives, Indian tribal leaders, and elected officials at the federal, state and local levels. Also involved are the Wisconsin Department Of Natural Resources (WDNR), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and several other local, state and federal government agencies. Two central issues of debate are: Who will pay for the cleanup? and When will the cleanup be good enough to remove public health warnings about fish consumption? Public debate and litigation about these sediments has been occurring since the 1970s. However, historians report that as early as 1923, there were similar debates about Fox River water quality involving other pollutants. One contaminant of special concern today is a group of chemicals called Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs. PCBs entered the river from many sources, but the largest deposits of Contaminated Sediments is traceable to piped discharges by local paper recycling mills. As a result of industrial pollution, the river has received the world's most detailed scientific study yet of chemical pollution in an ecosystem (see USEPA "Green Bay/Fox River Mass Balance Study"). Since the late 1800s, dredging of river bottom sediments has been done to allow large ships to enter the Fox River. The contaminated sediment has been used since the 1960s to fill local wetlands and after 1978 to create an off-shore engineered holding area called Renard Isle aka, Kidney Island. According to some measures of pollution (e.g. Dissolved Oxygen , pollution-tolerant worm counts), the Lower Fox River is much cleaner than it was before 1972. However, according to other measures of pollution (e.g., Phosphorus , estrogenic compounds, discarded pharmaceuticals), the river waters are much more contaminated than before 1972. More important to human health than river water is the chemical contamination of the Food Chain . Through Bioaccumulation , there is increased risk of human health problems from eating local game birds such as Mallard Ducks , and fish such as Walleye . SEE ALSO |
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