Pollution

"California’s public drinking water systems violated safety levels for contaminants more than 1,000 times during the 2012-2013 fiscal year says a report that cites high levels in some water systems of arsenic, nitrates and other pollutants."

"Criminal charges are expected to be brought against Duke Energy in the next several days that will accuse the nation’s largest electric utility of multiple misdemeanor violations of the federal Clean Water Act."

"The Arctic could become a site of future turmoil, and not just because of the emerging geopolitical tensions and militarization in the region. Beyond concerns of a frozen conflict in the icy north, there is the additional fear that the Barents and Kara Seas could become the location of a slow-motion nuclear disaster. Until 1991 the Soviet Union used the seas as a junkyard where it would dispose of its nuclear waste."

"Streams near large factory pig farms have high levels of bacteria. Health groups are raising a stink."

"Flame retardants and pesticide byproducts are showing up at potentially toxic levels in sharks, rays and other marine life in the Indian River Lagoon and in the ocean just off Brevard County."

"The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that it may ease an interim deadline for states to meet tougher carbon emission standards after regulators and electric utilities complained a lack of time may destabilize electricity supplies."

"Just north of Iliamna Lake in southwestern Alaska is an empty expanse of marsh and shrub that conceals one of the world’s great buried fortunes: A mile-thick layer of virgin ore said to contain at least 6.7 million pounds — or $120 billion worth — of gold."

"CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Emergency crews and environmental officials are responding to a train derailment in West Virginia that sent at least one tanker containing crude oil into a river and also caused a nearby house to catch fire."

"The federal government’s decision to consider making the Hackensack River a Superfund site is drawing praise from local mayors and other elected officials — but that praise comes with caveats, including a sense that the Hackensack’s pollution is so pervasive and its hydrology so complex that trying to clean it up might be a fool’s errand."

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has selected a plan to clean up dioxin contaminated properties along the Tittabawassee River floodplain and work is expected to start this year."