Here's an idea: let people know where 100-car trainloads of crude oil might be threatening their safety. After the July 2013 Lac-Mégantic disaster that killed 47, people might want to know about this. And the Federal Railroad Administration officially agrees — saying railroads can't hide this information. Now the Association of Washington Cities has an online map for that.
Yes, the pipeline is publicly regulated. Yes, the March 2013 rupture of Exxon's Pegasus Pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, quite publicly polluted people's yards and homes. Yes, it is publicly known that there were defects and poor maintenance on the pipeline. But 900,000 pages of documents that might show Exxon's neglect are being claimed as "confidential" by the company as it tries to defend against a class-action lawsuit.
After Katrina, Louisiana may have hit the national spotlight for a time, but coastal communities elsewhere around the country will have to find their own answers to the question “Why does anyone still live there in harm’s way?” — even as more and more people move toward the coast and the water moves ever closer to them.
In the effort to help all coastal communities face with the realities that the Gulf of Mexico is their neighbor and sea level rise is inching up relentlessly, lessons can be learned from Louisiana as it works to adapt and to mitigate flood risk.
The Center for Effective Government has compiled an interactive mapping database of some of the most dangerous chemical facilities in the U.S., showing their proximity to schools. The group also mapped which Congressional districts contain the most schoolkids at risk.
While the idea that government neglect and public ignorance are the right approach to chemical safety and security has lost some credence, information on chemical accidents is still hard to come by. Here are tips as well as news about the National Response Center's database of oil and chemical spills.
As a nationwide newspaper chain probed safety threats posed to the public by gas pipelines, an Alabama court imposed prior restraint on the Montgomery Advertiser, to prevent it from publishing the Alabama Gas Corporation's safety plan, citing homeland security and trade secrets. Now a judge has ruled that the court erred in granting a temporary restraining order.
More evidence of Congress' ineffectiveness comes in its ongoing failure to keep its secrets actually secret. Its official policy is to keep the Congressional Research Service from publicly releasing the handy explainers it produces at taxpayer expense. Thanks again to the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project for unauthorized publication of these reports.
In this issue: Covering the environment, health fallout of unexploded ordnance; special report on risk and resilience/lessons from Louisiana on the realities of coastal iving; freelancers and fellowships, a path for growth; utilizing the National Weather Service to track storm intensity; tapping the environmental journalism 'power grid'; book reviews; and classroom research on long-term relevance of front-page stories.
