Transportation

"Russ Lewis has picked up some strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns." ... "These items aren’t like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They’re the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean."

"The country’s most-visited national park site, the Blue Ridge Parkway, will remain closed indefinitely, the National Park Service (NPS) said Wednesday. The closure affects the entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway, though some parts were hit harder than others by storm damage. It comes right as the region and scenic road typically see a boom in tourism, as weather cools and the leaves change colors."

"The adoption of ship scrubbers—technology meant to clean up dirty fuel—has caused a surge in heavy metal pollution."

"Officials were working Wednesday to assess the scene the day after a chemical leak from a railcar prompted the evacuation of hundreds of residents in southwestern Ohio."

"Some of the country’s biggest food companies are making a small dent in their greenhouse gas emissions, but most are failing to make substantial and critical reductions, even as consumers and government regulators are pushing harder for them to do so."

"The GOP-controlled House approved a resolution Friday that would overturn a new Biden administration rule on automobile emissions that Republicans say would force Americans to buy unaffordable electric vehicles they don’t want."

"The worst drought on record has lowered the water level of the rivers in the Amazon basin to historic lows, in some cases drying up riverbeds that were previously navigable waterways."

"A federal appeals court on Friday appeared highly skeptical that the Trump administration had adequately weighed the safety and environmental risks of a rule authorizing rail transport of liquefied natural gas — even as judges questioned whether they should issue a decision yet on the suspended regulation."

"Kameale Terry saw it coming before almost anyone else did. She realized the expanding network of electric vehicle charging stations across the U.S. would need a workforce to maintain it."