The Cahaba River
For thousands of years, the Cahaba River, with the other rivers and streams of Alabama, has moved unceasingly to the sea. And just beneath the normally peaceful waters exist perhaps the greatest collection of plant and animal life in North America. Overstatement? Hardly.While Alabama is the 29th largest state, it ranks fourth in the number of plant and animal species. Fully eight percent of all the freshwater flowing through the continental United States flows through this state. Only Florida can rival Alabama in the number of species per square mile. Alabama's waterways host 38 percent of all the freshwater fill-breathing snails, 52 percent of all turtle species and 60 percent of all the freshwater mussel species. Since 1991, three new fish species previously undescribed by science have been found in the Mobile River basin. The Cahaba River has more fish species per mile, 131, than any river its size in North America, including 18 species that exist only in th
The Cahaba is the primary source of drinking water for one-quarter of Alabama's population. The Cahaba "peopleshed" includes more than 800,000 people in the Birmingham metropolitan area. In 1911, the Birmingham Water Works Board impounded the Little Cahaba to form Lake Purdy and solidify the city's drinking water supply. It raised the dam again in 1929. Ironically, most of Birmingham's drinking water, outside drought periods, is not released from Lake Purdy but taken directly from the main stem of the Cahaba. Each day the city takes from 50 to 100 million gallons of water from the Cahaba River/Little Cahaba/Lake Purdy system, averaging about 57 million gallons per day. For thousands of years people have lived along the banks of the Cahaba River, relying on it to provide the necessities of life. People have assigned many values to the Cahaba, some strictly utilitarian, others more abstract. Today, in a great twist of irony, the Cahaba is both our most important d
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 652
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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