Disasters

"D&L Energy Inc. is best known for its brine-injection well in the city that is suspected of triggering 11 Mahoning Valley earthquakes this year. But a Vindicator investigation conducted prior to the well shutdown Friday and Saturday’s magnitude-4.0 earthquake revealed the company has a history of at least 120 violations at 32 injection and extraction wells in Ohio and Pennsylvania during the past decade."

"Safety regulators are increasingly focusing on how seemingly minor problems with a natural-gas pipeline can combine to magnify the risk of an explosion or serious leak, as some experts say was probably the case in a blast that shook a rural Ohio neighborhood last month."

In the Japanese community of Kashiwa, scanning your food and soil for radiation is the new normal.

"Kashiwa, about 30 km northeast of Tokyo, is known for its humble beginnings as a 1970s bedroom community for Tokyo workers.

The tranquil residential city of 406,000 in Chiba Prefecture rarely enters the national spotlight, except when Kashiwa Reysol, the local soccer team, is playing at home.

"McDONALD, Ohio - Officials said Saturday they believe the latest earthquake activity in northeast Ohio is related to the injection of wastewater into the ground near a fault line, creating enough pressure to cause seismic activity.

The brine wastewater comes from drilling operations that use the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale. But Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director Jim Zehringer said during a news teleconference that fracking is not causing the quakes."

"US prosecutors are readying criminal charges against British oil giant BP employees over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident that led to the catastrophic Gulf oil spill, The Wall Street Journal reported online.

"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has misled Congress about the effectiveness of a nearly five-year-old program that is meant to secure the nation’s chemical facilities against potential terrorist attacks, says Sen. Susan M. Collins (R-Maine).

"State insurance regulators are feeling pressure to address climate change before a federal counterpart established last year moves in on their territory."

Congress' drive to cut spending could increase the threat to US citizens' from bioterrorism as well as more common epidemics, a new study says.

"Nigerian coastal and fishing communities were on Thursday put on alert after Shell admitted to an oil spill that is likely to be the worst in the area for a decade, according to government officials."

"Decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will take three or four decades, Japan's government said on Wednesday as it unveiled plans for the next phase of a huge and costly cleanup of the tsunami-wrecked complex."