Category: Environmental Contamination

Around the country, communities are beginning to understand that sites contaminated with toxic industrial chemicals pose another danger to surrounding neighborhoods: vapor intrusion. Families who had contaminated groundwater in their neighborhood–and believed that the problem was taken care of aft...

Recently, Ford Motor Company sent a letter to the owners of homes and businesses to the immediate east of Ford’s Transmission Plant in Livonia, Michigan, to deliver the unfortunate news that a chemical known as “vinyl chloride” is contaminating the shallow groundwater in their neighborhood. Th...

Beware of anyone who knows that people may be drinking or breathing dangerous chemicals, and yet doesn’t want to test to learn for certain if the chemicals are actually there. That kind of self-induced ignorance can cost people their health, even their lives. In my 17+ years as an environmental la...

It’s hard to say what’s worst about Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s choice to head the EPA. Among the choices are: ·He’s a paid shill for big oil companies who masqueraded as a public servant, i.e., the Attorney General of Oklahoma. ·He used his public office to do what big oil and other poll...

The recent resignation-in-disgrace of Trump Administration National Security Advisor (NSA), Michael Flynn, and the resulting damage to the country could have been avoided. If the President and his advisers had looked at Flynn more carefully before he was appointed to head the NSA (and assuming that ...

It is well known that President Trump’s pick to run the EPA, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has sued the EPA 14 times. What is not so well known is that many of these lawsuits are still pending. Specifically, still pending are lawsuits that Pruitt filed charging that the EPA is behaving i...

The City of Naperville has recently identified some 341 Naperville homes with lead water service lines. The City has yet to test 143 other homes that likewise may have lead service lines. Homes with lead service lines in Naperville would typically have been built before 1930-when the City outlawed l...

This week, the U.S. Senate votes on whether to approve President Trump’s choice, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”). Why should every Senator in the building vote “No”? Let me ask you this: Would it be OK with you if a lawyer for the world’s largest oil com...

I’ve written recently about President Trump’s determination to get the EPA out of the business of protecting the environment and the lives and health of the American people. (EPA Blog) (Gorsuch blog). Huge corporate polluters-including petroleum and mining companies-are tired of having to comply...

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to gut the Stream Protection Rule, which prevents coal companies from dumping mining waste into local streams. The environmental regulations on coal mining also required companies to test the quality of water that their mining operations could affect and ...