Talk:Elizabeth River (Virginia)

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Welcome to the Talk page for Elizabeth River (Virginia).

[edit] Removed content

On 1/31/06, someone (from an anon IP of course) removed all the current and Wikipedia formatted text in this article, and replaced it with the following. It reads suspiciously like a copyright violation cut and paste job. I have no specific direct evidence of that. However, deleting everything already in an article and substituting more lengthy but unformatted content is a WP no no. Maybe we can use some of this if we can cite the sources and work it into the previous work already done. Vaoverland 04:20, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

(deleted content follows)

The Elizabeth River is tidal tributary in southeastern Virginia that is a major waterway that spurs the local economy.

Location

There are three branches of this river that run through Norfolk, Chesapeake and Portsmouth, Virginia and covers about 375 square miles. It connects to the Southern most part of the Chesapeake Bay and the two bodies of water meet in the Norfolk Harbor.

History

The river got its name from Princess Elizabeth Stuart from the early Jamestown settlers. It is the main body of water in which the Norfolk and Portsmouth harbors were built on. Since the Revolutionary War with the Battle of Great Bridge,over the Elizabeth, resulted in a Patriots victory pushed the remaining British into Norfolk. In the Civil War the battle between the two iron clad ships, the USS Monitor and CCS Virginia (formely the USS Merrimack), was fought at the mouth of the river in the bay.

Significance

The River is used for numerous purposes. Virginia Power uses the river to cool their plant that provides power for most of southeastern Hampton Roads. It is also home for the Norfolk and Portsmouth Harbors. This Harbor is home to the largest Naval Base in the world. The New Port News Ship Building Company, which built the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan is also located in this harbor. The river is also part of the Alantic Coastal Water Way, a series of rivers, sounds, canals, and bays, inland along the east coast. It also connects to the Great Dismal Swamp. This causes a huge amount of traffic going up and down the river each day.

Problems

The Elizabeth River was identified as one of the most highly polluted rivers on the Chesapeake Bay Watershed in the early 80s due to the large amount of boats that use it and from the pestisides and fertilizers running off from the nearby farms in Chesapeake. This is greating a huge polluting problem at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Sediment Cantamination, Dissolved Oxygen, and Tributytlin, a chemical used on boats to prevent the formation of barnacles and are extremely poisonous to fish, are causing cancer in certian species of fish and a low variety in marine life; because of this, the river has been closed to harvesting fish and shellfishing. Since then great measures have been taken to reduce the number of toxins in the water and it has been monitered closely with the Navy being one of the front runners in the clean up process.