Category: Environmental Contamination

Around the country, communities are beginning to understand that sites contaminated with toxic industrial chemicals pose another danger to surrounding neighborhoods: vapor intrusion. Families who had contaminated groundwater in their neighborhood–and believed that the problem was taken care of aft...

Recently, Ford Motor Company sent a letter to the owners of homes and businesses to the immediate east of Ford’s Transmission Plant in Livonia, Michigan, to deliver the unfortunate news that a chemical known as “vinyl chloride” is contaminating the shallow groundwater in their neighborhood. Th...

Beware of anyone who knows that people may be drinking or breathing dangerous chemicals, and yet doesn’t want to test to learn for certain if the chemicals are actually there. That kind of self-induced ignorance can cost people their health, even their lives. In my 17+ years as an environmental la...

The City of Naperville has recently identified some 341 Naperville homes with lead water service lines. The City has yet to test 143 other homes that likewise may have lead service lines. Homes with lead service lines in Naperville would typically have been built before 1930-when the City outlawed l...

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to gut the Stream Protection Rule, which prevents coal companies from dumping mining waste into local streams. The environmental regulations on coal mining also required companies to test the quality of water that their mining operations could affect and ...

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 ...

Illinois legislators have an opportunity this fall to do something important and help to regain some of the public’s trust in government. They can pass a bill to test for lead in the drinking water at Illinois’ schools. (Yes, believe it or not, no such testing is currently required….as if we n...

This is about how to send the right message to a company that is alleged to have willfully endangered the health of workers. The company is Fraser Shipyard of Superior, Wisconsin. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has accused Fraser of exposing 190 welders and ship fab...

Day after day these days, we see expressions of clueless bewilderment from government officials: “Why are the people so mad at us?” “Why do they hate us?” “Why are they so anxious to throw us out of office?” There are, of course, a thousand reasons, but none more revealing of what’s br...

PORTLAND PARKS DIRECTOR NEEDS TO ‘GET’ THAT LEAD-CONTAMINATED DRINKING WATER IS DANGEROUS…..OR QUIT HIS JOB A recent review of the Portland Parks and Recreation’s (PPR) handling of high levels of lead contamination in the drinking fountains at the Multnomah Arts Center concluded that the age...