More pollution to put up with. :-(

Georgia county issues evacuation order for area around plastic resin plant after massive fire breaks out.



I guess that more details will follow.

Hook into those European vandals boys and girls, you have at least 50 million to go.

50,000 carp pulled from Darling River at Menindee as fish kill clean-up continues.

Here's how to get out of your responsibilities, file for bankruptcy and start all over again leaving the massive cleanup costs to taxpayers. :-O

State proposes $67 million to clean toxic parkways near former Exide battery plant.

California's budget proposal commits $67 million to clean thousands of lead-contaminated parkways in front of homes, schools and parks near the former Exide battery smelter in southeast Los Angeles County, state officials announced Friday.

At a news conference to discuss funding in California's environmental budget, state Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Yana Garcia said the state's proposal will dedicate $40.4 million in this year's budget, and nearly $27 million next year, to remove and replace toxic soil from more than 6,400 parkways — the publicly owned strips of land typically wedged between sidewalks and streets.

The funding will come from fees the state collects on car battery purchases.

"This key proposal builds on the administration and the Legislature's commitment to protecting communities and the environment from exposure to hazardous chemicals after Exide shirked its responsibility to clean up its contamination and bankruptcy courts subsequently let it off the hook," Garcia said. "This investment specifically allows us to work toward removing pathways of exposure for local residents, including children, surrounding the former Exide facility."......

It's just not right.

... It's just not right.

And then there's all the uncapped old disused oil and gas wells that are left abandoned around the USA...

And that is no small number...

Last I read, there were thousands, including some very expensive to fix examples out deep in the Gulf of Mexico (another Deepwater Horizon to happen?)...

That's thousands of millions of dollars to 'remedy'...

And who pays again?


All on our only one planet,
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Here's how to get out of your responsibilities, file for bankruptcy and start all over again leaving the massive cleanup costs to taxpayers. :-O

State proposes $67 million to clean toxic parkways near former Exide battery plant.

California's budget proposal commits $67 million to clean thousands of lead-contaminated parkways in front of homes, schools and parks near the former Exide battery smelter in southeast Los Angeles County, state officials announced Friday.

At a news conference to discuss funding in California's environmental budget, state Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Yana Garcia said the state's proposal will dedicate $40.4 million in this year's budget, and nearly $27 million next year, to remove and replace toxic soil from more than 6,400 parkways — the publicly owned strips of land typically wedged between sidewalks and streets.

The funding will come from fees the state collects on car battery purchases.

"This key proposal builds on the administration and the Legislature's commitment to protecting communities and the environment from exposure to hazardous chemicals after Exide shirked its responsibility to clean up its contamination and bankruptcy courts subsequently let it off the hook," Garcia said. "This investment specifically allows us to work toward removing pathways of exposure for local residents, including children, surrounding the former Exide facility."......

It's just not right.

Work is within the cleanup area. I see the contractor NCA doing "clean up" at many houses. Saw one that made me wonder if anyone understands clean up. They pulled up the grass, took a foot of soil, brought in "clean" soil, then put the grass back. No they didn't bring new sod they put back the same contaminated sod.

Oh, the "clean up" does not cover commercial properties. So the contamination will continue to spread for centuries.

And a BTW, Interstate 5 runs right through the middle of the area. I wonder how much of the lead contamination is from leaded gasoline and not Exide? I see it officially was completed in 1956, however several of the bridges over it carry pre WWII dates stamped into the concrete.

MAGA RINO's and SCOTUS certainly don't care about the environment.

Trump Rolled Back Decades Of Clean Water Protections. The Supreme Court Just Went Even Further.

The penalty wasn't enough and no mention is made about remediation of the contaminated land.

California jury returns $63M verdict after finding Chevron covered up toxic pit before selling land.

A California jury has returned a $63 million verdict against Chevron after finding the oil giant covered up a toxic chemical pit and then sold the land to a man who built a house on it and was later diagnosed with a blood cancer.

Kevin Wright, who has multiple myeloma, unknowingly built his home directly over the chemical pit near Santa Barbara in 1985, according to his lawsuit.

Starting in 1974, Chevron subsidiary Union Oil had used the land as a sump pit for oil and gas production, a process that left the carcinogenic chemical benzene in the ground, court papers said.

The company sold the property to Wright in 1983. Nearly three decades later, Wright was diagnosed with the cancer that attacks plasma cells in the blood and can be caused by benzene exposure, court documents said.

The jurors in Santa Barbara on Wednesday returned the $63 million verdict, said Jakob Norman, an attorney for Wright. Norman called the case a “blatant example of environmental pollution and corporate malfeasance.”

Chevron didn't immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment on the jury award....

Well they couldn't do it themselves so New waste rules will be forced on the Australian packaging industry to avoid repeat of REDCycle debacle.

Australia's packaging industry will be forced to clean up its act under mandatory waste-busting regulations that will also deal with harmful chemicals used to contain food.

It's been known for some time that the industry would face regulation, after it failed to meet the voluntary targets to cut landfill by ramping up the recovery and reuse of used packaging.

After meeting on Friday, federal, state and territory environment ministers provided the first details about what that will mean.

Manufacturers will have to comply with new design standards that will limit waste from the get-go.

Some of the new rules will deal with the inclusion of recycled content.

There will also be regulations to address the use of harmful chemicals in food packaging that can include the long-lived PFAS family — toxic substances that do not break down and build up in the food chain and human bodies.

"This is about designing out packaging waste from the start," the ministers said in a joint statement......

Unlike our previous federal government who let these polluters carry on as they wished our new 1 is determined to clean them up.

Just another case where land remediation isn't mentioned.

Owners of Metal Scrapyard Next To Jordan High School in Watts Charged With 22 Felonies.

A metal salvage and recycling yard adjacent to Jordan High School in Watts was charged with 24 criminal counts for alleged illegal disposal of hazardous waste, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.

S&W Atlas Iron and Metal Corp. and its owners, Gary and Matthew Weisenberg, were charged with 21 felony counts of knowingly disposing hazardous waste at a site with no permit and one felony count of deposit of hazardous waste, prosecutors said. They were also charged with single misdemeanor counts of public nuisance and failure to maintain or operate a facility to minimize the possibility of a fire.

Arraignment for the defendants was set for Monday in DTLA.

Officials with Atlas could not be reached for immediate comment as of earlier this afternoon.

The charges are the latest legal entanglement for the company, which was sued in 2020 by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The federal lawsuit alleges hazardous substances, waste and fumes from the salvage yard were endangering students and faculty at Jordan High. The suit even contended that a pair of explosions in 2002 sent metal shrapnel raining onto the campus.

According to the District Attorney’s Office, soil samples taken at the high school adjacent to the Atlas facility “showed excessive concentrations of lead and zinc,” while samples taken at Atlas found excessive concentrations of seven metals......

Loved the news conference where DA (there are no criminals) Gascon said how horrible copper and nickle were. What does every school kid have in his/her pocket. Copper pennies and nickles.

These fossil fuel companies and the messes that they make. :-(

Oil spill from Shell pipeline fouls farms and a river in a long-polluted part of Nigeria.

A new oil spill at a Shell facility in Nigeria has contaminated farmland and a river, upending livelihoods in the fishing and farming communities in part of the Niger Delta, which has long endured environmental pollution caused by the oil industry.

The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, or NOSDRA, told The Associated Press that the spill came from the Trans-Niger Pipeline operated by Shell that crosses through communities in the Eleme area of Ogoniland, a region where the London-based energy giant has faced decadeslong local pushback to its oil exploration.

The volume of oil spilled has not been determined, but activists have published images of polluted farmland, water surfaces blighted by oil sheens and dead fish mired in sticky crude.

While spills are frequent in the region due to vandalism from oil thieves and a lack of maintenance to pipelines, according to the U.N. Environmental Program, activists call this a “major one.”

It is “one of the worst in the last 16 years in Ogoniland," said Fyneface Dumnamene, an environmental activist whose nonproft monitors spills in the Delta region. It began June 11.

“It lasted for over a week, bursts into Okulu River — which adjoins other rivers and ultimately empties into the Atlantic Ocean — and affects several communities and displaces more than 300 fishers,” said Dumnamene of the Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre.

He said tides have sent oil sheens about 10 kilometers (6 miles) further to creeks near the nation’s oil business capital, Port Harcourt.

Shell stopped production in Ogoniland more than 20 years ago amid deadly unrest from residents protesting environmental damage, but the Trans-Niger Pipeline still sends crude from oil fields in other areas through the region's communities to export terminals.

The leak has been contained, but treating the fallout from the spill at farms and the Okulu River, which runs through communities, has stalled, NOSDRA Director General Idris Musa said.....

Just another problem (and eyesore) made by a major petrochemical company that has to be cleaned up, but who'll pay for it to be done is another story that is yet to be written. :-(

For more than half a century, the Mobil oil refinery was at the heart of Melbourne’s industrial west. But since its closure two years ago, vastly different hopes for the site’s future have emerged.

There's plenty of steel there to be recycled, but what will be done with all the contaminated soil?

No, that is not fog.

Newcrest's Cadia gold mine responds to Environmental Protection Authority's order to reduce dust.

The Environment Protection Authority says it wants to see proof that a New South Wales gold mine has reduced its dust pollution.

The NSW EPA says it has received a letter from Cadia Valley Operations' parent company, Newcrest Mining, outlining measures it has taken to lower dust emissions.

"They've laid out a series of operational changes they've made to their underground processes that, in their view, have substantially reduced the production of dust and created a situation where the mine should now be in compliance," EPA chief executive Tony Chappel said.

"They've also laid out a number of other steps underground in terms of better containing and managing any dust that is produced."

Mr Chappel says he is waiting for data from the mine, expected in the next few days, to verify its claims......

The race is on to prevent a disaster.

This ghost ship floating off Yemen is a ticking time bomb. Now begins the delicate operation to prevent an explosion or oil spill.

For eight years, a rusted, decaying supertanker, storing more than 1 million barrels of oil, has sat off the coast of the Red Sea, threatening to explode and cause one of the world's worst environmental disasters.

But a bitter Middle East conflict has prevented anyone from fixing the problem.

Now, after years of planning, a specialised salvage crew is attempting to remove the oil in a daring and delicate operation.

It's the first time such a mission has ever been attempted.

But the United Nations (UN) says the risk of leaving the oil where it is far outweighs the potential danger of attempting to transfer it to another ship......

It's just a shame that stupidity put it in that position in the 1st place.

Our fossil fuel loving right wingnut state government let them get away with a lot, but it's a different story now.

Regulator fines third NSW coal mine in a month, Tahmoor Colliery, over unlicensed water losses.

The water watchdog has fined another NSW coal mine for taking an unknown quantity of water in an alleged breach of its operating conditions.

The Tahmoor coal mine, south-west of Sydney, agreed to an enforceable undertaking with the Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) over the water losses.

The mine is owned by SIMEC Mining, which is part of British Indian billionaire Sanjeev Gupta's GFG Alliance.

The operator agreed to pay $150,000 in compensation, $50,000 for not having adequate water licences and $25,000 for rehabilitation work at Stonequarry Creek.

The regulator was unable to determine exactly how much water was lost at Redbank and Myrtle Creeks, due to the damage caused by underground long wall mining.

"It has been a complex investigation, part of the issue was that there was a difficulty with a lack of data," NRAR director of investigations and enforcement Lisa Stockley said.

"In fact some of the river gauges were undermined due the damage..

...Tahmoor is the third coal mine in NSW to be fined for breaching its water licence in the past month.

The Dendrobium coal mine in the Illawarra region just south of Tahmoor recently agreed to pay $2.9 million for draining an estimated five megalitres a day since 2016.

The Boggabri open-cut coal mine will also pay $54,000 for water losses due to its operations......

Personally I reckon that an extra 0 should've been added to a lot of those fines.

WTF? No backup systems?

New Orleans' raw sewage will go in Mississippi River for another 2 weeks.

Raw sewage from New Orleans will be dumped into the Mississippi River for another two weeks while workers fix a new break in a sewer main, officials said Thursday.

The city's Sewerage & Water Board says the repairs are expected to be done by Aug. 20.

Construction workers were testing repairs last week on the initial break when they found the new leak.

A 60-inch main broke on July 7 at the city's water station at 2800 Florida Ave.

In an emergency move, the city diverted wastewater into the river, a decision officials called "crucial" to avoid backups in homes.
The city said the pipe is more than 60 years old and cited its age as the cause of the breaks.....

Unbelievable.

Should we reconsider all these rocket launches?

Musk SpaceX Rocket Tears a Hole in the Ionosphere Again.

The launch of a SpaceX rocket has punched a hole in the planet's ionosphere, leaving a red aurora-like glow in the night sky above California.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in order to deliver 15 Starlink satellites.

The rocket's exhaust fumes reacted with the Earth's ionosphere, temporarily creating a hole in the layer of ionized gases—a few weeks after another Falcon 9 launch did the same thing.

The ionosphere is the upper layer of the atmosphere, around 50 to 400 miles above the Earth's surface. It is filled with charged atoms, called ions, that glow red or green during the aurora as they react with solar wind and radiation from coronal mass ejections or solar flares.

This layer is essential to radio communication because it reflects and refracts radio signals between the sender and receiver, which is why solar flares can cause radio blackouts.

The exhaust from rocket launches—containing mostly water and carbon dioxide—can alter the layer's ionization, reacting with the ions. This exhaust can result in a 70 percent drop in ionization in the area that the rocket passes through, particularly in the F-layer at the top of the ionosphere, essentially carving a hole through the layer.

The hallmark red glow is a fingerprint of this hole, as it is a result of oxygen ions reacting with the rocket exhaust. Oxygen ions are also the cause of redder colors in the northern and southern lights.

Several photographers captured pictures of the telltale red glow stretching across the California sky on Monday and posted them on social media.

The holes usually close up as the layer returns to its usual levels of ionization. They may lead to anomalies in ham radio transmission or GPS errors.....

How convenient for oil profits?...


Frackers can use dangerous chemicals without disclosure...
wrote:

Facking industry exempt from disclosure of 28 chemicals regulated by federal law.

For almost 20 years, US public-health advocates have worried that toxic chemicals are getting into ground water and harming human health because of an exemption to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act that allows operators of oil and gas fracking operations to use chemicals that would be regulated if used for any other purpose...

... the industry can use fracking fluid containing chemicals linked to negative health effects including kidney and liver disease, fertility impairment, and reduced sperm counts without being subject to regulation...

... ethylene glycol, used by the industry as a friction-reducer and gelling agent, that can harm the eyes, skin, kidneys, and respiratory system and even kill humans if swallowed...

... acrylamide, another friction-reducer, which appeared in 19 percent of the cases notified to the database. Its health effects include nervous-system impairments including muscle weakness, numbness in hands and feet, and sweating...

... Benzene, which can cause cancer at high or prolonged exposures...

... Other regulated chemicals identified by the study include naphthalene, formaldehyde, and 1,4 dioxane, which are variously linked to negative effects on the nervous, respiratory, urinary, and gastrointestinal...

... “Chemicals that are often used in fracking often do show up in drinking water or soil, but putting together the causal links from one to the other is extremely difficult because of these absences of data that include the Halliburton Loophole,”...

Stay healthy?...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

1 problem almost solved.

Oil taken off 'time bomb' tanker abandoned off Yemen.

But there's still the ship itself to deal with.

A report shows that our European ancestors were enviromental idiots.

Invasive species such as feral cats the number-one driver of biodiversity loss in Australia, UN report shows.

.....What about Australia?

While things are bad globally, they are even worse in Australia.

"Australia has close to 3,000 invasive alien species estimated to cost Australia approximately $25 billion every year in losses to agriculture and management costs," CSIRO chief research scientist for biosecurity Andy Sheppard said.

"Globally, they are in the top five drivers of biodiversity loss, alongside land and sea use change, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, and pollution.

"However, in Australia, they are number one – they are the leading cause of biodiversity loss and species extinction."

And there are a few key culprits, according to Dr Sheppard.

"Australia's most impactful invasive alien vertebrates in terms of biodiversity impacts are feral cats on land, and European carp in our rivers," he said.

"But from a cost-to-agriculture perspective, European rabbits remain at the top of the list.

"Our most harmful invasive invertebrate is red imported fire ants, because they affect human health, the environment and agriculture."......

Then there's all the feral foxes, goats, pigs, deer, camels, horses,..........