"BALTIMORE — An environmental group said Wednesday that infrared video shows air pollution streaming from natural gas sites that have been sprouting up across the Chesapeake Bay watershed."

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- CONSOL Energy has signed on to a legal settlement that marks the first time a coal company has agreed to clean up conductivity pollution associated with a valley fill, an environmental group lawyer said Wednesday."

Maryland is struggling with a backlog of water pollution violations.

"Long-awaited revisions to the Delaware River Basin Commission's proposed rules that would govern natural-gas development in the watershed were released Tuesday."

"At the Conowingo Hydroelectric Dam in northeast Maryland, the barbarians are at the sluice gates.

Sediment, millions of tons of it, has flowed down the 440-mile Susquehanna River for more than 80 years and massed at the dam. And now a reservoir built to hold it is filling up.

"Efforts to reduce pollution of the Chesapeake Bay are starting to pay off, a major new study says, finding that despite weather-driven ups and downs, the 'dead zone' that stresses fish and shellfish every summer has actually shrunk, on average, in recent years."

"Maryland's highest court struck down Monday a key provision of state law that shielded owners of older rental housing from civil lawsuits -- and potentially costly payments to victims -- if they took precautions to protect children in their units from lead-paint poisoning."

"ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Pennsylvania environmental regulators said Wednesday they have given permission to a natural-gas driller to stop delivering replacement water to residents whose drinking water wells were tainted with methane. Residents expressed outrage and threatened to take the matter to court."

EPA's official investigation of a massive 2009 fish kill in West Virginia's Dunkard Creek ended by blaming the pollution squarely on Consol Energy's Blacksville No. 2 mine. But an EPA biologist said that coal mine drainage alone was not enough to explain the problem -- and that contamination of mine pools by methane and water from the Marcellus Shale formation was possibly an additional cause.