"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said it has serious concerns over the 'inadequate' response to the Flint toxic water crisis by both the city and Michigan officials, pointing to a lack of expert help on the ground and a failure to provide a proper water treatment plan."
"LANSING — Gov. Rick Snyder and Flint Mayor Karen Weaver — already at odds over how quickly Flint's lead service lines that carry drinking water to homes should be replaced — are also split over Snyder's choice of an engineering firm that a state document says helped prepare the city before its botched switch to using Flint River water."
"Minnesota’s moose continued their long decline in 2015."
"The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency fired two employees in its Columbus office on Wednesday, and demoted a third employee in the EPA's northeastern district over lead contamination in the Mahoning County village of Sebring."
Maine passed a law in 2015 that allowed railroads to keep oil-train routing information from the public — over the governor's veto. In the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting's Pine Tree Watchdog, Dave Sherwood reports how the provision was a bait-and-switch.
Bad as it is, the Flint drinking water disaster is hardly uncommon. Even though the law requires authorities to tell the public of dangerous levels of lead in drinking water, they often don't.
"Residents of Flint, Michigan, began getting gravely ill and in some cases dying in summer 2014 in one of the worst outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in U.S. history, and a county health director says attempts to find the source were hampered when the state wouldn't request federal assistance."
"Gov. Rick Snyder and other state officials allegedly withheld lead testing results from county health officials while they worked to find ways to present the information to the public, according to emails obtained by The Flint Journal."
"More than two years after federal researchers found high levels of lead in homes where water mains had been replaced or new meters installed, city officials still do little to caution Chicagoans about potential health risks posed by work that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is speeding up across the city."
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