Pollution

" State environmental officials say air sampling shows there’s been a drop in the chemical benzene since the closure of the Tonawanda Coke plant in western New York."

"A Belle Chasse marine contractor given the job of stopping a 14-year-old oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is defending itself against a lawsuit alleging it’s unqualified for the work and may cause more environmental damage."

"Hundreds of thousands of homes in the Southeast may have had their wells inundated by record-level floodwater resulting from major hurricanes this year, yet only a fraction have been tested for harmful contaminants."

"Elmira High School is one of 1,290 active and 220 potential toxic legacy sites statewide, according to an analysis of state records by the Elmira Star-Gazette."

"The results landed on Nikolai Vitti’s desk on a late summer afternoon, days before Detroit’s nearly 50,000 public school students would return to class. The findings were definitive and disturbing: In initial tests, two-thirds of schools showed alarming levels of lead in the water."

"A crew of engineers in the middle of the ocean will try to fix a device that was intended to clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic have coalesced into a field of debris twice the size of Texas."

"Michigan legislators were poised Tuesday to remove legal protections from many of the state’s wetlands and other inland waterways, which provide wildlife habitat and perform vital tasks such as preventing floods."

"EPA offered a steady defense today [Tuesday] of Obama-era ozone standards the agency previously considered scrapping.

During long-awaited oral arguments at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, government lawyers defended the agency's 2015 thresholds for the air pollutant as "forward progress" aimed at protecting vulnerable people.

"The revised ozone standards here represent notable forward progress in protecting the health of all Americans across this country," Justice Department attorney Justin Heminger told a three-judge panel this morning."

"Off Cedar Key on Florida's west coast, the water is some of the most pristine in the Gulf. The estuary there has long supported a thriving seafood industry."

"Potentially billions of dollars in damages are at stake in more than a hundred lawsuits against chemical companies, manufacturers, the U.S. military, and others for contaminating water supplies with toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of more than 4,000 man-made chemicals known collectively as PFASs."