TagU.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Radiation has turned north county St. Louis into a National Sacrifice Zone. It’s way past time for the feds to act

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(NOTE: For more detailed information on how the North County radiation site might affect you or your property, please visit our website, stlouisradiationlawsuits.com, or call 516-908-6901. After decades of denial followed by years of delay, the federal government began telling the concerned residents of St. Louis’ North County suburbs a few years back that it finally had a plan to deal with...

Texas chemical blast shows we’re moving backwards on pollution, safety

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Thanksgiving was cancelled in Port Neches, Texas, this year. Things ever should have gotten to this point. Very early on the days before the holiday, this Gulf Coast community near the Texas-Louisiana border was rocked by one explosion that lit the night sky — then another, hours later. Residents of Port Neches and several surrounding communities, where windows were shattered by the force...

In Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley,’ inaction makes a sick town even sicker

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Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” is America’s worst-kept secret. I know this because I’ve been writing about the state’s perilous and often unsightly stretch of chemical plants, oil refineries and other industrial plants ever since I started this blog nearly a decade ago, aiming to call attention to a major public health hazard in our midst. My native state has one of the nation’s highest rates of...

Christmas comes early for La. pollution fighters

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A few months ago, I told you about the latest public health crisis in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” — the strip of heavily polluting refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities that line the banks of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge all the way down past New Orleans. Many of the most threatened community are predominantly poor and predominantly black...

EPA comes out with the truth on fracking and drinking water

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It was just a year and a half ago that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came out with its first draft of a much-anticipated report about the impact that the boom in hydraulic fracking operations, or fracking, around the country was having on our drinking water. Environmentalists had encouraged such a study because the anecdotal evidence — people living near fracking rigs who...

Meet the small La. town with America’s highest cancer risk

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I’ve written on this site about problems in what the locals in Louisiana call “Cancer Alley” — the massive petrochemical facilities that mostly line the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. For decades, this industrialized corridor has reflected the push and the pull between Louisiana’s desperate need for well-paying blue-collar jobs and...

Another poor Rust Belt community is under assault by lead

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It’s almost starting to become a cliche in 2016: That this poor community or that city is poised to become “the new Flint.” It’s not surprising that such a stunning case of governmental malfeasance — allowing residents of a mid-sized, economically challenged community to drink corrosive lead-poisoned water for nearly two years — would become the new low...

How fracking ruins your health

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In the roughly six years I’ve been writing in this spot, one constant has been this” News of what the process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas does to the health of the planet, and the people who live here, just keep getting worse and worse. In the beginning, public officials insisted the process was 100 percent safe and could not possibly pollute public water...

Shocker: The EPA’s plan to let you drink radioactive water

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The world not long ago marked the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan — an ongoing nuclear crisis that may not be cleaned up for decades, and even that may be optimistic. Lingering high radiation levels mean that swaths of northern Japan remain uninhabitable — unsafe to eat local food, breathe the air, or drink the water. To many, the 2011 Fukushima tragedy...

Outrage as 11-year-long Gulf oil spill called “an act of God”

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When it comes to environmental outrages in the Gulf of Mexico, I thought I had seen and heard everything…until today. The issue at hand is the so-called Taylor Energy oil spill off the Louisiana coastline — a slow motion ecological train wreck that’s been taking place for more than a decade. Now there’s no question that — when it comes to sheer volume and amount of...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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