SEJournal has the "Inside Story" on "The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America's Schools," a USA Today series by Blake Morrison and Brad Heath that won SEJ's 2009 Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting.
Both backers and critics of coal are often seeing EPA's crackdown on mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia as inconsistent and tentative. "To each side, it looks like the EPA hasn't made up its mind. Which would make now the time to yell as loudly as possible."
"In the first enforcement of its kind against a public agency, the (Calif.) State Water Board on Tuesday said it has reached a $6.2 million settlement with the city of Long Beach for extensive violations of regulations governing the storage of petroleum and waste oil in underground storage tanks."
"Facing a $5 million funding cut, the [Va.] state Department of Environmental Quality last summer scrapped the $365,000 PCB monitoring program."
"Kansas' largest electric company has agreed to upgrade pollution controls at its biggest power plant under a legal settlement announced Monday by the utility and federal officials."
"AUGUSTA, Maine — State environmental officials began making their case Monday for a $200 million cleanup of the HoltraChem site in Orrington, arguing that contaminants in five outdated landfills threaten groundwater supplies and the Penobscot River."
"Search warrants served on two Cook Inlet oil facilities last week were based on federal environmental regulators' suspicions that Chevron Corp. had knowingly violated its air pollution permits and made false statements, court filings show."
"More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found."
"DALLAS -- Crews worked Sunday to protect two sensitive wildlife areas after a crude oil spill shut down parts of a major southeast Texas port, state Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said."
"An exhaustive report on Portland Harbor contamination -- written by industries and local government agencies that will likely have to pay for much of the cleanup -- tends to 'minimize the risks to human health and the environment' from harbor pollution, federal regulators say."
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