Fifty percent of Americans depend on groundwater for daily use in their homes, i.e., drinking, showering, etc. Unfortunately, the quality and safety of our groundwater is under increasing threat from a variety of man-made sources, with potentially grave risk to the health of those in our family who may be…
According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, California’s public water systems in the San Joaquin Valley and urban areas like LA and San Bernardino and San Mateo counties are contaminated with a very dangerous, cancer-causing chemical known as 1,2,3 trichloropropane (“TCP”). Evidently, the TCP is a remnant of a chemical…
I’ve been doing environmental contamination cases for about 20 years now, and have talked to hundreds of families who have gotten the bad news that there is a dangerous chemical in their water, air, or yard. What I have learned over the process of talking to these people and being…
For the last 17 years, I and a team of lawyers have been representing families threatened by TCE contamination in their water supply, in the groundwater underneath their homes, and in the air inside their homes (called “vapor intrusion”). Recent reports in the media, unfortunately, describe how TCE, disposed of…
This is about the importance of clean water to sustain health and life; how we as Americans assume (often mistakenly) that we will always have it; and an extraordinary young man named Seth Maxwell who founded Thirst Project, which is dedicated to the simple but powerful idea that clean water…
On May 14, 2015, in a federal courtroom in Greenville, North Carolina, coal combusting giant Duke Energy pled guilty to committing 9 environmental crimes for its years of illegal discharge of coal ash pollution throughout the State of North Carolina. Duke Energy will also pay some $102 million in fines…
In March 2015, Syracuse University hydrology professor, Donald Siegel, and a team of other scientists published a fracking study in Environmental Science and Technology, the bottom line of which is, basically, “fracking is safe”. At least that’s the way that the pro-fracking forces are selling it. Specifically, Professor Siegel and…
The LA Times and environmental advocacy group, Water Defense, recently combined to show what a sham so-called “environmental testing” can sometimes be, because it creates the illusion of protection for the people, when in truth there is very little, or maybe even none at all. In its May 2, 2015…
Why isn’t the State of North Carolina doing more to protect its own citizens against contaminated water? For years, North Carolina has departed from the practice of most states, and allowed political heavyweight Duke Energy to store coal ash–the toxic residue of coal burning–in unlined pits near bodies of water…
Unfortunately, Deborah and Ralph Graham of Dukeville, North Carolina can now be added to the large and growing list of American families who are learning the hard way that they cannot trust their government to protect them against chemical contamination, even though the Grahams pay their government (in taxes) to…