SE (AL AR FL GA KY LA MS NC PR SC TN)

"Tallassee, Ala., wants the agency to defend them from a landfill company, but residents say proposed rule changes would not be effective enough".

"One of the rarest whales in the world has been spotted off the coast of South Carolina for the first time in three years."

"On the Sea Islands along the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, a painful chapter of American history is playing out again. These islands are home to the Gullah or Geechee people, the descendants of enslaved Africans who were brought to work at the plantations that once ran down the southern Atlantic coast."

State and local authorities placed a landfill in the historically black community of Rogers-Eubank outside Chapel Hill, NC, back in 1972, promising to bring municipal services in return. Four decades later, those promises have yet to be fulfilled.

"Kentucky may be the nation’s third-leading coal producer, but over the years it has increasingly turned to other states to supply coal for its power plants."

"Federal wildlife managers want Florida’s manatee, the whiskered lumbering icon that came to represent the fight to save the state’s vulnerable wildlife, removed from the endangered species list."

"In early 2014, evidence of radioactive pollution was discovered in the city of Oak Ridge's sewage treatment facility on the west side of town."

"Contractors at Entergy's Waterford 3 nuclear power plant on the west bank of St. Charles Parish failed to conduct required hourly fire inspections and falsified records for 10 months to show the inspections occurred, according to the results of a 15-month-long investigation announced Wednesday (Dec. 23) by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

"A leaked draft report compiled by [North Carolina] state environmental officials shows that the coal ash waste in a huge basin at the Duke Energy power plant in Belews Creek, and in basins at almost all other Duke power plant sites statewide, will have to be excavated and put in lined landfills by 2019."