Toxics Targeting in the News
CS Sunday: Oil Spill & Jobs
The segment in the transcript below starts at 11:00 minutes into the video.
DEC addresses South Hill toxins
The difficult geology on Ithaca's South Hill makes it virtually impossible to actually remove toxic contamination from beneath neighborhoods, according to staff from the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The DEC hosted a public meeting Thursday night at Ithaca Town Hall, attended by roughly 25 people, to present and answer questions on the agency's Proposed Remedial Action Plan for the neighborhood north and downhill from Emerson Power Transmission.
Devastating BP oil spill was inevitable as government failed to learn from past tragedies
A catastrophic oil spill was waiting to happen.
That's what one expert who has studied government data on the huge and growing number of Gulf of Mexico spills is saying.
"There have been thousands of spills from 1990 to 2009," said Walter Hang, head of Toxics Targeting, an Ithaca, N.Y., company that tracks and analyzes federal hazardous spill reports.
While many were small, the sheer number of incidents is mind-boggling, Hang said.
Sewer committee delays decision on Cornell vet waste
The decision about whether the Ithaca wastewater treatment plant should accept digested animal carcass waste from Cornell University has been put off for another month.
At a Wednesday afternoon meeting, the multi-municipality committee that oversees the publicly owned plant agreed to delay a vote until its next session, July 14, because two of its members -- Ithaca mayor Carolyn Peterson and Ithaca Town Board member Pat Leary -- were unable to attend.
The Next Drilling Disaster?
A tour of Dimock, Pennsylvania, with Victoria Switzer is a bumpy ride over torn-up roads, around parking lots filled with heavy machinery and storage tanks, and past well pads that not long ago were forests. The winter here was quiet, but with the thawing ground came the return of the rigs, the trucks, the constant noise and lights of a twenty-four-hour-a-day gas drilling operation.
Drill down, to the truth
One of the natural gas industry's selling points on why New Yorkers should welcome drilling of the vast Marcellus Shale is that the method of choice, hydraulic fracturing, has never contaminated a drinking well or water supply, or caused any environmental mishap in this state.
Never. That's a pretty definitive word, allowing no exceptions. But in this case, it may require an asterisk. Or a bunch of them.