Author: Shawn Collins

The threat that chemicals contaminating groundwater are turning into a gas (‘vaporizing”) and drifting upward to intrude into the breathing space of overlying homes exists in many neighborhoods throughout the country. And this threat will remain with us for decades, as we continue to try to deal...

I want to take a moment to recognize McHenry County, IL, and its Public Health Administrator, Michael Hill, for disclosing on the County’s website what it calls “Groundwater Contamination Incidents”. http://ow.ly/Gb7v30cyNOF McHenry, while a fast-developing county, is not far removed from its ...

Government Often Keeps Us in the Dark Is your government protecting you? If your air or water is contaminated, and your government knows it, it’ll tell you, right? Sadly, the answer to these questions is often, “no”. I’ve represented thousands of families over the last 18 years who have disc...

If Scott Pruitt wants to spend his professional career as little more than a cabana boy to polluters, that’s his business. Until. He wants to be in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency, whose mission it is to regulate and, where necessary, punish those same polluters. There, Pruitt’s...

How long after the discovery of chemical contamination in groundwater should the government be checking to see if those chemicals have turned into a gas (“vapor”), and migrated upward to intrude into the breathing space of homes? They shouldn’t wait a quarter of a century, that’s for sure. N...

The US Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) continues to provide very valuable information about consumer products which are recalled for the threats they pose to the health of their users, and perhaps others. For example, CPSC reports that, over just the last two weeks, tens of thousands of p...

All landfills produce gas. The decomposition of the garbage dumped there sets off a chemical process that produces potentially many different kinds of gasses. If you live near a landfill-particularly near an older or still operating landfill-you should be concerned about whether the landfill’s gas...

Over these last few days since President Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, he and his aides-most prominently, EPA chief Scott Pruitt-have been unwilling to answer a simple question: “Does the President think that climate change is a hoax?” However, for as important as this que...

One of the surest topics on which to get agreement is that we should punish the filing of “frivolous” lawsuits. There are legitimate debates to be had over the definition of “frivolous”, who decides what is “frivolous”, and what the punishment (usually called a “sanction”) should be....

I strongly believe that there is. As a lawyer who has represented many thousands of families victimized by contamination of their air and water, I see the same things happening over and over again: ·Poor, inner-city minorities are disproportionately the victims of these environmental problems. To a...