SE (AL AR FL GA KY LA MS NC PR SC TN)

"Toxic heavy metals found on the construction site of a planned $55 million replacement for the former Booker T. Washington High School in New Orleans will require the removal of 3 feet of soil in areas that won't be covered by the new building's concrete foundation or parking lots, according to a report submitted on behalf of the Recovery School District to the state Department of Environmental Quality."

"South of Florida's Lake Okeechobee, hundreds of thousands of acres of sugar cane thrive in the heart of one of the world's largest wetlands. The Everglades stretches from the tip of the peninsula to central Florida, north of Lake Okeechobee."

"Florida filed a lawsuit on Tuesday asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reduce neighboring Georgia's use of water from the Chattahoochee River that feeds the oyster beds and fish-spawning areas of Florida's Gulf Coast."

"Federal wildlife officials will test a new trap designed to capture Burmese pythons. The Burmese pythons have overrun the Florida Everglades because they have no natural predators."

"Cancer-causing industrial chemicals have been found in the sewers at a Columbia-area restaurant as a state investigation of illegal dumping expands from the Upstate to the Midlands, where utility officials scrambled this week to learn more about the threat to central South Carolina."

"Wild pigs have descended on a suburban Atlanta neighborhood where they are scaring children, making a general nuisance of themselves, and acting as they if they own the place."

"North Carolina’s environment agency has taken the unusual step of returning a federal grant to study streams and wetlands that could be harmed by hydraulic fracturing for natural gas."

"MIAMI -- When she was little, Elaine Taylor remembers rushing home whenever Old Smokey fired up. Clouds of ash from the towering trash incinerator would fill the air and settle on the ramshackle houses and the yards of the West Grove neighborhood."