That was a question that many people were worried about! Why were millions of fish dying? The answer to the question was very complicated.

The Neuse River is not a "clean" river. While it flows from its headwaters to its "mouth" (where it empties into the Pamlico Sound") it travels through cities and miles of farmland. Almost as soon as it begins, it receives a lot of water from a waste-water treatment plant from the city of Durham. This water, although it is cleaned, still contains many traces of an element called nitrogen. Is this bad? Not really. But there are many other water-treatment plants along the way, putting water with nitrogen into the river. Nitrogen also gets into the river when people put too much fertilizer on their yard, and it washes away. Remember what a watershed is? Well, when it gets washed away by the rain, the fertilizer will be carried by that rainwater until it runs off into the river. There are many other ways that humans add nitrogen to the water, like when leaky sewage pipes or septic tanks allow nitrogen and other substances to get into the water. The Neuse also runs for many miles through agricultural areas, where a lot of farming or animal raising takes place. When animal waste goes into the water it adds a lot of nitrogen, too. A large amount of animal waste is dumped into the Neuse River, and so a lot of Nitrogen goes in, too. But what about the fish dying? Are any one of these the reason that the fish began to die? No. But, when you add them all together you get a problem. And that problem is a lot of nitrogen in the water.