Trains carrying hazardous liquids have recently caused more than a dozen explosions, fires, and spills around the country. But communities have little say over hazardous rail facilities in their midst. The rail industry is exploiting obscure historic exemptions from state and local laws protecting communities.
"A coalition of U.S. states warned on Monday that a spike in earthquakes potentially tied to oil and gas activity in places not typically prone to them needs urgent attention from regulators and others to protect public safety."
"MIDDLETOWN, Calif. — The firefighters collapse in driveways and fields to steal a moment’s rest. They sleep in their engines, sprawled across fire hoses or slumped over steering wheels. After days of hacking dead brush and setting defensive fires across flaming mountains, their 24-hour rest breaks are cut short when a new fire rears up."
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has for years suppressed full disclosure of the National Inventory of Dams, once a key tool for journalists reporting on dam safety — or the government's failure to ensure it. Now that tool is back in the toolbox ... mostly.
Access to water quality data was an issue at one highly politicized House hearing on the August 5, 2015, toxic spill from a long-abandoned mine near Silverton, Colorado, where New Mexico Secretary of Environment Ryan Flynn accused EPA of refusing for weeks to share data on the quality of waters fouled by the spill.
"Nine years ago, a rice paddy in eastern Java suddenly cleaved open and began spewing steaming mud. Before long, it covered an area twice the size of Central Park; roads, factories and homes disappeared under a tide of reeking muck. Twenty lives were lost and nearly 40,000 people displaced, with damages topping $2.7 billion."
"President Barack Obama declared a major disaster Tuesday in a Northern California wildfire that has destroyed at least 1,200 homes and killed at least three people."
"Syria's civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a 'doomsday' vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday."
"California’s historic drought is in its fourth year and gloom-and-doom scenarios of its impact on everything from killing the state’s vegetation and triggering bug infestation to destroying farming jobs have been trickling in daily."
"President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the nation’s rail safety agency told lawmakers Thursday that the agency would hold railroads to a year-end deadline to install collision-avoidance technology even if it meant that freight and passengers could be left stranded."
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