A soon-to-be-published study has found elevated levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, probable human carcinogens toxic to fish and other aquatic life, in waterways are originating from coal tar-based pavement sealcoats.
Low-income residents of small towns in California's San Joaquin Valley, often Latinos, suffer from unhealthful drinking water caused by the valley's booming agriculture. Now some activists are fighting back.
New York state is strewn with abandoned wells -- the relics of drilling booms before the current gas bonanza. Their owners are long gone, but they have left a legacy of pollution, sticking taxpayers with the cleanup costs.
Many cities in Wisconsin still face toxic contamination from municipal gas plants closed six decades ago. Similar sites are found in other states.
"The Chesapeake Bay does not like your lawn. That green grass is probably coated with pesticides and fertilizers and studded with pet poop. All that washes off in the rain and causes environmental problems downstream in the Chesapeake."
EPA in-house tool may be released to public within months. It will give reporters themselves the ability to estimate the cumulative impacts of pollution on water bodies.
myRTK lets you thumb in an address or ZIP code and get back a map or list of Toxics Release Inventory facilities on your feature phone or smart phone.
This new tool allows any user online to create custom study areas based on a wide range of variables: address, ZIP code, county, city, township, facility, watershed, or geographic coordinates. Other environmental data can then be mapped onto that study area.
The beta tool allows anyone to compare TRI information from a facility to air pollution data from the same facility or a related one. For example, an investigator could find inconsistencies in the amount of pollution reported by a facility under the two separate laws.
This newly powerful, easy-to-use mapping tool can help environmental journalists find and report great local and regional stories.
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