"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."
When it comes to telling environment and energy stories, especially about place and scale, data visualizations can turn an average story into a standout. Reporter’s Toolbox takes a look at some recent examples of inspiring data-mapping projects that provide insight into everything from auto emissions and floods to vanishing rivers and whipping winds.
As U.S. coal’s comedown continues, our latest Issue Backgrounder takes a close look at the factors behind the industry’s decline and finds a combination of economics, competition and shifting global markets, along with aging technology, politics and environmental pushback. What’s in store for coal in 2020?
"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."
"Five decades ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the polluted Potomac River a “national disgrace.” Although it is now much cleaner, officials in Washington are still not convinced the water is safe for humans to swim in. But many miles downriver, where the Potomac widens to lakelike proportions as it flows toward the Chesapeake Bay, it teems with a different species of swimmers whose presence may signal healthier waters: dolphins."
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