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Water News

COMMUNITY VOICES: Our kids deserve clean water

Today, many of our school districts are not getting their water tested. You would think after the water crisis in Flint, Mich., that all public entities in the United States would be testing their tap water regularly and making the results available to the public.
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Homepage Water News

The Costly, Complicated Process of Cleaning Up a Toxic River

In eastern Washington, a push to clean PCBs from the Spokane River faces a dirty legacy and global pollution problem.
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Superfund News

Zionsville Superfund site consultant offers help in Franklin

ZIONSVILLE, Ind. (WISH) — A man who worked as an environmental consultant on a federal Superfund site near Zionsville in the 1980s is offering his services to help with an investigation into toxins in Franklin.
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Backyard Talk

10th Anniversary of Nation’s Largest Coal Ash Spill

By: Sharon Franklin
As we look back at the holiday season, it is only a reminder to Mike Dunn of the health issue his wife Sandy encountered, who was a 40-year employee of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  Mike is reminded of the 2008 Christmas Eve when Sandy left their Alcoa, Tennessee home and her family and headed to the Kingston Fossil Plant, where 7.3 million tons of coal ash was spilling from a busted dike.  Sandy knew nothing about coal ash, even though she worked in the safety division of the largest producer of coal ash in the nation.
 
Six years later, Sandy was dead, poisoned, her family says, by coal ash dust that her bosses said was safe.  According to the Dunn family today, more than 30 workers at the clean-up site are now dead, and more than 250 are sick, and many more may be sick.  
 
Coal ash contamination and its affects are also being reported in other areas, such as the one reported by Molly Samuel, a reporter at WABE, an Atlanta, Georgia Public Broadcasting radio station.  Ms. Samuel reported that the toxic coal ash pollutants are leaking into groundwater from 92 percent of Georgia coal-fired power plants, according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice.
 
The report Georgia At a Cross Roads  documents widespread groundwater contamination at Georgia’s coal ash dumpsites   It reports that eleven of the state’s 12 coal-fired power plants are leaking pollution into the state’s underground water supplies, and 10 of these 11 polluting plants are owned by a single company, Georgia Power.  The report outlines the effects of coal ash, and explains the hazardous brew of toxic pollutants such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, radium, selenium and other toxic elements. The toxic elements in coal ash can cause cancer, heart disease, reproductive failure and stroke, and can inflict lasting brain damage on children.  Additionally, the report noted that Georgia Power owns all of the contaminated waste sites that are located near lakes and rivers.  The Environmental Integrity Project attorney Abel Russ, one of the authors of report said “Georgia is at a crossroads with respect to the toxic legacy of coal-burning.”  
 
The report concluded that “We do not know the extent to which the tested groundwater is used for drinking, but regardless of use, these levels represent a significant deterioration of water quality by coal ash.  Releases of these pollutants to the environment are particularly troublesome, because once they leach into groundwater, the harmful pollutants do not go away or degrade over time.”

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Homepage News Archive

Inspiring Women of Ecology

In fighting to protect her community from toxic waste, this housewife started a movement that led to the creation of the EPA’s Superfund.
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Water News

Making America’s Waters Burn Again

The Trump administration’s new Dirty Water Rule seeks to strip the Clean Water Act’s protections from an overwhelming number of our waterways and return our water to levels of pollution we last saw before the Clean Water Act’s enactment in 1972.
 
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Water News

Sustainable Earth: Water

CLEAN WATER IS essential for life, but most people in the developed world don’t think much about the water they use for drinking, food preparation, and sanitation. In developing nations, however, the search for safe drinking water can be a daily crisis. Millions of people die each year, most of them children, from largely preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation.
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Homepage

MD Reject Permit for “Potomac Pipeline”

In what environmentalists hope is a major shift in state energy policy, Governor Larry Hogan voted to reject a permit necessary for a fracked-gas pipeline known as the “Potomac Pipeline.” During the Maryland Board of Public Works’ semi-monthly meeting, January 2nd Hogan and the other members of the board unanimously rejected a right-of-way easement for the project, which is proposed by a subsidiary of notorious energy company TransCanada.
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Homepage

2018 Was A Raging, Howling Signal of Climate Change

Record rainfall and flooding in Japan, followed by a heat wave that sent tens of thousands of people to the hospital. Astonishing temperature records set across the planet, including sweltering weather above the Arctic Circle. Historic, lethal wildfires in Greece, Sweden and California, terrible flooding in India, a super typhoon with 165-mph winds in the Philippines, and two record-setting hurricanes that slammed the Southeast United States.
Natural disasters cost the world $155 billion this year, and several of them struck the United States particularly hard. Michael and Florence, the California wildfires and a volcanic eruption in Hawaii are all on that list, according to the Zurich-based reinsurance company Swiss Re. But it doesn’t match what happened in 2017. That was the costliest weather year in U.S. history, with more than $300 billion in damage, Woods Hole Research Center senior scientist Jennifer Francis said in an essay published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Read More.

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Backyard Talk

2019 – What Do Think Will Happen? Here’s some thoughts.

If you think the last two years were bananas, 2019 is going to be a real doozy.
My colleague, James Mumm at People’s Action Institute, wrote this insightful forward looking piece and thought I’d share it with you.  I spent the last few hours of 2018 thinking about what we need to do next year to defeat Trump and Trumpism. We played solid defense this year. We created a #PeoplesWave to take back the House and many states in the midterms. But Trump is still president and McConnell and the GOP have a stronger grasp on the Senate.
Here is what I know. Trump blames everyone but himself when things go wrong. Now that the economy is off the rails thanks to his erratic international and domestic actions, he is pointing fingers in every direction except where it belongs (squarely at himself).
Trump tries to act big because he feels small inside. His edifice complex will not bring him the love of his mother or father, nor the majority of the American people. Truth is, his world is very small. A shrinking circle of yes men and women, campaign rallies with diehard fans, and a chorus of Fox News right-wing extremists.
If you think the last two years were bananas, 2019 is going to be a real doozy. With an incoming Democratic majority in the House and Mueller’s investigation coming to a crescendo, the walls are closing in on Trump. His entire world is shrinking and that makes him panic.

  1. Trump will double down on anti-immigrant white nationalist populism.Trump is going to lash out with all the power of his office against immigrants, women, LGBTQ communities, people of color, low-income families. We will need to play ferocious defense against these attacks.
  2. The Trump 2020 campaign will swing into high gear and make us all fear that he could win again.I learned a hard lesson in 2016. Michael Moore and my mom both said that Trump was going to win. I scoffed. Well, I scoff no more. This could happen and it terrifies me (you too I bet).
  3. Trump’s instability and chaos will cause a recession.One year ago, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan rammed their tax scam through Congress. The result? Big corporations gave CEOs and investors one trillion dollars in the form of stock buybacks. The tax scam did not create jobs; it made millionaires and billionaires wealthier while creating a mountain of public debt that the rest of us have to pay off. Trump took a lot of unwarranted credit for the economy when it was booming. Now Trump will have to own the coming recession. And the next Democratic president will have to do something bold (see next prediction) to pull America out of a spiraling crisis.
  4. The word of the year in 2019 will be “Green New Deal.”This is a bold idea that Democratic presidential contenders will be wise to endorse. A Green New Deal that is 100% Just is a total winner. 100% Just means 100% renewable energy and 100% equitable for the communities of color and low-income communities on the frontlines of climate change. This could be the answer to how we save people and planet at the same time.
  5. Lightning will strike twice and the #PeoplesWave will continue with thousands of fearless progressive women, people of color and young people running for (and winning) local office. There are thousands of city council, county, school board, and more elections happening across the country next year. The country is changing from the bottom up and there is nothing that Trump and the GOP can do about that.