A tank collapse at Lima’s INEOS plant shook parts of the region Sunday night, but authorities assured residents there was no threat to the community.
The Shawnee Township Fire Department responded to INEOS at 1900 Fort Amanda Road, Lima, at 7:59 p.m. Sunday, according to John Norris, platoon chief and public information officer for the Shawnee Township Fire Department. They found a tank had collapsed. There were no injuries, and crews remained on scene for several hours.
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Category: News Archive
In 1981, a doctor in a small mill town in Maine read a study suggesting that prostate and colon cancers in his community were nearly double the national average. Spooked, he brought the research to the board of directors at the local hospital; they ignored it. A few years later, a survey conducted by the Maine Department of Health suggested that the town, Rumford, had an especially high incidence of cancer, aplastic anemia and lung disease. The state epidemiologist insisted that the data were inconclusive. In 1991, a TV news series christened the area “Cancer Valley” because of the number of people there who had been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Doc Martin, as the local doctor was known, got a call from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Why, the institute wanted to know, were “all these kids with cancer” coming from Rumford?
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Photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
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Photo credit: NBC News
Over four years in office, the Trump administration has dismantled major climate policies and rolled back many more rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals.
While other administrations have emphasized cutting regulations, calling them burdensome to industries like coal, oil and gas, the scope of actions under Mr. Trump is “fundamentally different,” said Hana V. Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.
In all, a New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 70 environmental rules and regulations officially reversed, revoked or otherwise rolled back under Mr. Trump. Another 26 rollbacks are still in progress.
Photo credit: The New York Times
Some challenges to US climate action are obvious – like when Donald Trump boasts about leaving the international Paris agreement and rolling back pollution rules.
But many more play out behind the scenes. One of those is the battle over efforts to make America’s new homes and buildings more energy-efficient.
Photo credit: Justin Lane/EPA
If rising seas cause America’s coastal housing market to dive — or, as many economists warn, when — the beginning might look a little like what’s happening in the tiny town of Bal Harbour, a glittering community on the northernmost tip of Miami Beach.
With single-family homes selling for an average of $3.6 million, Bal Harbour epitomizes high-end Florida waterfront property. But around 2013, something started to change: The annual number of homes sales began to drop — tumbling by half by 2018 — a sign that fewer people wanted to buy.
Photo credit: Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times
Prosecutions of environmental crimes have “plummeted” during the Trump administration, according to a new report.
The first two years of the Trump administration had a 70 percent decrease in criminal prosecutions under the Clean Water Act and a decrease of more than 50 percent under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan law school found.
Photo credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
As the planet continues to warm, people living in the world’s most vulnerable regions — like arid or low-lying nations — must contend with the decision to stay in a place where livability is decreasing or leave for countries with more stable climate and economic conditions.
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Photo credit: ENN
For the last two years of the Obama administration, Jacob Carter built data models at the Environmental Protection Agency that showed how extreme weather events amplified by climate change threatened hundreds of the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps, known as Superfund sites.
President Barack Obama had made combating climate change the EPA’s No. 1 priority, and Carter was a true believer, working on plans the agency’s regional administrators could use to safeguard those sites.
But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, everything changed at the EPA. Trump was a climate change denier, and soon the words “climate change” were excised from agency policy. It didn’t take long for the knock on Carter’s door.
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Photo credit: Karen Ducey
To date, what we know about the petrochemical plant under construction in Beaver County has come from its owner, Shell Chemical Co.
That won’t always be the case. When the plant starts producing its plastic pellets sometime in the next few years, it will put information into the world, through air and water emissions.
A number of local environmental and citizen groups are mobilizing to scoop up that data and shift the information and, they hope, the power dynamic between the multinational company and its Beaver County neighbors.
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Photo credit: Andrew Rush / Post-Gazette