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New York Times

Articles in the New York Times that include Toxics Targeting.

Toxic Tidbits, via the Web

HAVE you ever wondered about health hazards lurking underground near your home, your workplace or a property that you are thinking of buying or renting?

For locations in New York State, there is now an easy way to find out, without resorting to costly testing of groundwater and soil core samples. A free Web site enables anyone — including prospective buyers and sellers, brokers and neighbors — to check a location by typing in its address.

Gulf of Mexico Has Long Been a Dump Site for Industry

According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Oil Supply Picture Has Changed Since Keystone Was Proposed

HOUSTON — When the Obama administration began considering the Keystone XL pipeline seven years ago, oil production in the United States was falling and most analysts thought it would never recover. At the same time, Mexican oil production was also in decline, meaning that domestic refineries would soon need another source of crude.

In Town of Contaminated Wells, Outrage and Fear



One Sunday afternoon in mid-October, Daniel Whalen was helping a neighbor saw a limb off a tree when the neighbor said something disturbing: state environmental officials had told him to stop drinking water from his well, and to stop cooking and showering with it, too.

Albany Survey Of Toxic Sites Is Unpublished

New York State environmental officials last year compiled an internal list of more than 1,500 places where soil or water had been contaminated with M.T.B.E., a gasoline additive that makes water taste like turpentine and is a possible cause of cancer and other health problems.

The tally of M.T.B.E. sites is more than three times the number reported publicly in the state's toxic-spills database, which real estate buyers and suppliers of drinking water use to spot contamination problems.

New Round of Comments on Drilling




Gov. David A. Paterson ordered state environmental officials on Monday to complete revisions to their proposed standards for a controversial type of natural-gas drilling by June and submit them to a new round of public comment.

Decrepit Station Houses Erode Police Morale, Officers Say









For years when it rained, police officers in the 50th Precinct station house say, their basement locker room flooded and they had to dress in puddles of water tainted with petroleum from a fuel spill beneath the building.

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