"Capping more than three years of study, the O'Malley administration declared Tuesday that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas can be done safely in Western Maryland, but only after regulations are tightened to reduce air and water pollution and protect residents from well contamination, noise and other disruptions associated with an anticipated drilling boom."
"Over the objection of environmental groups and Virginia's governor, a federal management plan released Tuesday will allow a form of natural gas drilling known as fracking to occur in parts of the largest national forest on the East Coast."
"Whitemarsh Run looks a mess, more a construction site than a stream. With its flow temporarily dammed and diverted, a track hoe is carving out a new, more sinuous channel for the badly degraded waterway running through a built-up patch of northeastern Baltimore County. New banks are being built, armored in places with granite boulders — all part of a $13 million makeover that's intended to help clean up the nearby Bird River and the Chesapeake Bay."
"The Chesapeake Bay was once home to more than a dozen offshore island communities — tight-knit villages with enough land for baseball diamonds and with marshes thick with crabs and fish."
"West Virginia regulators have revoked the state certification for a Raleigh County laboratory, following the guilty plea of a lab supervisor who admitted he and other employees falsified coal industry samples so mining operations would appear to be in compliance with water pollution standards."
"As the Tomblin administration considers a plan to allow natural gas drilling under the Ohio River, a major chemical maker in Marshall County has been fighting a proposal for hydraulic fracturing near its plant, citing a 'near-catastrophic' gas-well incident last year that might be linked to geologic conditions beneath the river."
"Nearly one in five large Maryland chicken farms has been fined recently, state regulators have disclosed, because the growers failed to file information required annually outlining what they did to keep their flocks' waste from polluting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries."
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