A recent report by the American Lung Association ranked the Philadelphia-Reading-Camden metro area among the top 25 most polluted in the United States in terms of two of the most common, and dangerous, ambient air pollutants measured nationally. But experts say the ranking doesn’t tell the whole story of how air quality affects those in the region.
The Lung Association’s 22nd annual “State of the Air” report, released in mid-April, is based on data gathered from 2017 to 2019 and focuses on two of the six major air pollutants originally identified by the Clean Air Act of 1970. The four-state, 16-county Philadelphia metro area ranked as the 17th most polluted in the nation for its year-round average levels of fine particle pollution (sometimes called soot pollution) and as the 21st most polluted for days with high levels of ozone smog.
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Marine scientists say they have found what they believe to be as many as 25,000 barrels that possibly contain DDT dumped off the Southern California coast near Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to World War II has long been suspected.
The 27,345 “barrel-like” images were captured by researchers at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They mapped more than 36,000 acres of seafloor between Santa Catalina Island and the Los Angeles coast in a region previously found to contain high levels of the toxic chemical in sediments and in the ecosystem.
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On a recent weekend, when Ana Gonzalez was driving through Rialto, California, where she has lived for 23 years, she saw a disturbing and increasingly familiar sight. Dozens of 18-wheel diesel trucks idled outside an Amazon warehouse, spewing fumes not far from a high school and homes. It made Gonzalez so angry that she took out her phone to broadcast the scene to her Facebook page.
Gonzalez’s frustration with the high concentration of warehouses and the truck traffic they bring was spurred two years ago when she took one of her two kids, Jose, then 12, to the doctor because he was constantly coughing and getting sick. She said the doctor told her that Jose’s bronchitis and developing asthma were direct results of local pollution.
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Photo Credit: Watchara Phomicinda/Orange County Register/ZUMAPRESS.com
LAKE CHARLES, LA. — Nine oil refineries and chemical companies in the Lake Charles area have agreed to pay the federal government $5.5 million for their contamination of parts of the northern Calcasieu River estuary.
The settlement was announced this month by the U.S. Justice Department, according to The Times-Picayune / The New Orleans Advocate. The latest in a series of federal and state legal actions against more than a dozen industrial plants for polluting the river basin with toxic chemicals and heavy metals, including dioxin and mercury, it covers less than half of the Environmental Protection Agency’s $13 million response costs for contamination caused by this group.
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As Biden deliberated where to unveil the American Jobs Plan in late March, Pittsburgh was an obvious choice. A former manufacturing mainstay, it was where Biden launched his presidential campaign two years ago, in a sign that he wanted to revitalize the Rust Belt. Now, he returned to reaffirm his commitment to the region by making it the spot to announce over $2 trillion in infrastructure spending.
Yet Pittsburgh was an apt choice for another reason. The surrounding county is home to four of Pennsylvania’s most toxic Superfund sites. (The state is saddled with 91 sites in total.) Although Biden didn’t mention it in his speech that day, the American Jobs Plan, if passed, would pump money into the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund program, which has been in a dire financial state for the last two decades.
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Photo Credit: Matt Rourke/AP Photo
The battle over the massive Gowanus rezoning plan roiling Brooklyn involves urgent environmental issues that we ignore at our physical and moral peril.
The latest news is the discovery by a longtime Gowanus blogger that lethal coal tar poisoning land next to the canal had, as early as 2005, migrated beyond that land and slithered underneath existing buildings to the north, the canal itself and beyond to the east and Smith St. to the west. Katia Kelly dug into official archives maintained by National Grid, which is responsible for the site cleanup, and found proof of the migration. Neither the utility nor the state Department of Environmental Conservation overseeing the cleanup ever announced it publicly.
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The 5th District of Louisiana’s St. James Parish was never exactly a bustling community — but it was still a community.
Then the landmarks began to disappear. Woodrow’s grocery closed down. The St. James sugar co-op ground to a halt. And the cleaners and post office shut their doors for lack of business.
Heavy manufacturing moved in. Duck’s Grocery sold out to a rail-car and crude-oil storage facility. The high school football field was overrun by subsidiaries of a Chinese company and the Koch family’s corporate empire, which teamed up to build a huge petrochemical plant. Buena Vista Baptist Church now worships a couple of thousand feet from a methanol plant and asphalt depot.
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Photo Credit: Camille Lenain/The Washington Post
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS withheld information about carcinogenic pollution from Illinois communities, according to a report released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general. Bill Wehrum, who served as assistant administrator of the office of Air and Radiation until 2019, kept information from residents of Willowbrook, Illinois, about results of air monitoring that showed they had an elevated risk of cancer due to ethylene oxide from a local sterilizing plant, according to the report, “EPA Delayed Risk Communication and Issued Instructions Hindering Region 5’s Ability to Address Ethylene Oxide Emissions,” which was produced in response to a request from Congress.
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Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. on Tuesday introduced legislation to renew a federal tax on the oil and chemical industries to fund the cleanup of Superfund sites, of which New Jersey has more than any other state.
“Superfund sites threaten public and environmental health in New Jersey and across the country, and those sites could be cleaned up faster with adequate funding,” said Pallone, D-6th Dist., who outlined his plan during a Zoom press conference.
Pallone, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee with jurisdiction over the issue, said he was proposing the legislation in response to President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, introduced the Superfund Reinvestment Act to require polluters to pay for the cleanup of toxic and hazardous waste sites throughout the United States.
For nearly three decades, petrochemical industry polluters have enjoyed environmental liability protections without paying into the Superfund Trust Fund, which has depleted the fund, unfairly shifted costs to taxpayers, and brought some Superfund cleanup efforts to a near stop. The legislation introduced by Blumenauer would reinstate this tax, something that President Biden identified as a top priority as part of a major infrastructure package.
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Photo Credit: The Skanner Archives