"Pigeon Creek flows through a narrow mountain hollow along a string of coal mining communities, its water trickling under the reds and yellows of the changing fall foliage. The tranquil scene belies the devastation the creek delivered one night a decade ago as heavy rain fell on soggy soil and thousands of acres of nearby strip mines."

"Craig Bettenhausen is terrified every time it rains. After a storm, the junior warden knows what might await him at North Baltimore’s Church of the Guardian Angel: a putrid stench and gray-brown bubbling waste coating the basement floors."

"It was a display of kindness that should have been heartwarming. Instead, Frederick Douglass Elementary School teacher Alison Marcus just felt queasy."

"The FBI has begun a corruption investigation into how Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration came to issue permits for construction on a multibillion-dollar pipeline project to carry highly volatile natural gas liquids across Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned."

A little-known disease caused by mycobacteria seems to be causing a decline of striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay.

"Conowingo Dam owner Exelon Corp. and the state of Maryland have reached a settlement under which the Chicago-based energy company will invest $200 million to clean up the Susquehanna River, and, by extension, the Chesapeake Bay."

"In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from the Eastern Shore farm where she was enslaved. Over the next several years, she would return 13 times, rescuing more than 70 enslaved relatives and friends, ... She has become a hero, with two national parks established in her honor, ... . But time has not been as kind to the lands that Tubman left behind, or the descendants of the first free African-American communities that called them home."