"A Canadian Pacific train derailed in rural North Dakota Sunday night and spilled hazardous materials. But local authorities and the railroad said there is no threat to public safety."
With the federal government now requiring that states pay closer attention to cybersecurity risks in their regular audits of public drinking water systems, environmental journalists should be doing the same, suggests the latest TipSheet. Here’s how to gauge the cyber risk and to understand the current safe drinking water regulatory regime, plus story ideas and resources to bolster your local reporting.
"A new report found that companies in Texas have had 21,000 unexpected pollution releases that emitted 400,000 tons of air pollution over six years, but only 1% of them prompted action by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality."
"Amid lawsuits filed by thousands of farmers linking the herbicide to Parkinson’s disease, the EPA is reconsidering its analysis of paraquat’s risks."
"First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking realization that the nation's largest manufacturer of DDT had once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground—and that as many as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured straight into the water."
"A small South Carolina law firm angling to be the lead litigator in the Camp Lejeune toxic water cases spent $1.9 million lobbying US lawmakers in the last two years, as Congress approved a multibillion-dollar payout to sickened veterans that dropped a provision to limit the fees their lawyers could charge."
"Norfolk Southern Railway CEO Alan Shaw said Wednesday that he supports certain aspects of a bipartisan railroad safety bill introduced after a train operated by the company crashed in East Palestine, Ohio, but declined to endorse the bill as a whole."
"Trump administration appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) meddled in agency science to weaken the toxicity assessment of a dangerous chemical, a new report by the US body’s internal watchdog has found."
"Brazil has ousted almost all illegal gold miners from the Yanomami territory, its largest indigenous reservation, and will remove miners from six more reserves this year, the head of the federal police's new environmental crimes division said Tuesday."
"A deadly fungus spreading at an alarming rate in U.S. health facilities has exposed the broader problem of how patient safety is jeopardized by underfunded and understaffed infection-prevention efforts, experts say."
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