Pollution

"An environmental disaster in North Carolina reveals that a rare, potentially dangerous compound is abundant in burned coal."

CHICAGO - "Federal environmental regulators are cracking down on a Southeast Side company after finding high levels of brain-damaging manganese in a low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood."

"In a sweeping legal fight that could affect drinking water supplies for thousands of Sacramento-area residents, two water districts near the old McClellan Air Force Base are suing the federal government for $1.4 billion to clean up the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium from the area’s groundwater supplies."

"Days after the Environmental Protection Agency pledged to reconsider damage claims it previously rejected after a mine spill, the agency said Monday it could not review multimillion-dollar requests from the state of New Mexico and the Navajo Nation because both have sued the agency."

"Pollution from illegal marijuana farms deep in California's national forests is far worse than previously thought, and has turned thousands of acres into waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the hospital."

"Contractors in Detroit were under so much pressure to knock down thousands of abandoned properties that they cut corners, mishandled deadly asbestos at dozens of sites, and, in two cases, appeared to falsify inspection reports, according to documents the Free Press obtained under the state Freedom of Information Act."

"Discharges of sewage, trash, and toxic sludge from Mexico have one California border city threatening to sue a binational agency charged with managing water pollution along the U.S.-Mexico border."

"Dealing a blow to the Trump administration and business groups, a federal appeals court will allow California and a half-dozen other states to intervene in litigation to defend U.S. EPA's 2015 ground-level ozone standard."

"The federal government appears to have significantly underestimated the amount of lead, arsenic and other dangerous pollutants that are sent into the air from uncontrolled burning of hazardous waste at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia, according to a draft of a long-awaited report compiled by researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency."

"It's become a rite of summer. Every year, a 'dead zone' appears in the Gulf of Mexico. It's an area where water doesn't have enough oxygen for fish to survive. And every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) commissions scientists to venture out into the Gulf to measure it. This week, NOAA announced that this year's dead zone is the biggest one ever measured."