Environmental Health

"City officials in Newark said they learned in October that lead water contamination wasn’t just affecting a dozen homes, but was a “widespread problem,” potentially impacting as many as 40,000 residents. But, a newly-released email shows officials were warned at least seven months earlier — months they spent insisting the water was “absolutely safe to drink,” and assuring residents that the issue was confined to a small number of homes."

"Today’s black lung rates are higher than 50 years ago, affecting men as young as their 30s, and in Kentucky their right to decent healthcare is being curtailed".

"Eleven of Georgia’s 12 coal-powered plants are leaking chemicals into the groundwater, according to a study by a group of environmentalists that was released Thursday."

"The strain of E. coli causing the current outbreak in romaine lettuce has been found in a reservoir on a farm in Santa Barbara County, California, the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday."

"When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them. But it turns out that there was a hidden beneficiary of the plan that was pushing for the changes all along: the nation’s oil industry."

"West Virginia’s Joe Manchin will become the Democrats’ top member on the Senate energy committee, giving the coal-state lawmaker a prominent position to shape policy."

"ANN ARBOR, MI – PFAS levels in Ann Arbor’s drinking water spiked in October and city officials aren’t sure why."

"Two of acting EPA chief Andrew Wheeler's appointees to a prominent advisory committee are pushing back against his recent decision to disband an auxiliary panel involved in a closely watched review of airborne particulate standards."

"The Trump administration says it doesn't know how many streams it is proposing to exclude from Clean Water Act jurisdiction today. But a 2017 slideshow prepared by EPA and Army Corps of Engineers staff shows that at least 18 percent of streams and 51 percent of wetlands nationwide would not be protected under the new definition of "waters of the United States," or WOTUS, announced today."