California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control has acknowledged a basic lesson our parents teach: We need to clean up our own messes.
After a half-dozen years of study, hearings and hand-wringing, the department last week finally approved Chemical Waste Management’s request to expand its 1,600-acre hazardous-waste landfill in a remote part of Kings County known as Kettleman Hills, on the west side of Interstate 5. It is overdue…
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The Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said they have finalized a permit that will allow Chemical Waste Management Inc. to expand their capacity by five million cubic yards.
The DTCS said along with the expansion, they have strengthened environmental safeguards and increased reporting and public information requirements. They said the facility is currently operating near capacity…
The controversial Chemical Waste Management hazardous waste landfill near Kettleman City is authorized to expand by 5 million cubic yards, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control said Wednesday.
The decision would let the landfill remain open at least eight more years, officials said.
Under its current permit, the Kettleman Hills landfill was allowed to grow to 10.7 million cubic yards, which have mostly been used…
Today, the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) released a list of 13 key environmental health and justice issues moving through the state legislature this year. CEJA is a statewide coalition of grassroots organizations working on environmental issues that impact working class communities and communities of color.
The 2014 Legislative Agenda includes a variety of measures related to climate change, clean energy, environmental health, and social equity…
A new report released by the California Department of Public Health has found that a staggering 505,141 schoolchildren go to school within a quarter of a mile of crop fields sprayed with the top 10 most hazardous chemical pesticides, the top five of which are specifically fumigants. Latino schoolchildren are 91 percent more likely to attend schools next to these highly hazardous fields than their white peers…
Outside her front door, Carmen Almanza has a postcard view of the Sierra Nevada and a huge pot of water for drinking, washing dishes and flushing the toilet.
Carmen, 79, and husband Al, also 79, have lived in this cozy house 33 years, raised seven children and never worried about water in rural Tulare County. But when the kitchen tap suddenly died one morning in early April, they knew their private well had run dry.
After a month of feverish calls, Carmen said she can’t find help for a $15,000 loan to drill the well deeper. They’ve been living without running water in a kind of financial limbo…
Who would have thought that the intersection of agriculture, industry, freeways and poverty would produce the worst environmental hot spots in the state?
Two years of fine-tuning the CalEnviroScreen interactive map from the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) have proven what most everyone in the area, if not the state, already knew: It sucks to be in Fresno, environmentally speaking, of course…
The complicated web of things needed to make Kettleman City’s clean water plant a reality is becoming even more complicated.
The latest snag: A strongly-worded letter fired off by environmental groups last week that raises new doubts about funding sources for the plant, which will suck water out of the California Aqueduct and purify it, thereby replacing the polluted groundwater residents receive now.
The quest to get the project funded has multiple components, one of which is an agreement Chem Waste signed onto in 2009, when the company got a conditional use permit from the county to build a new hazardous waste landfill at the landfill complex southwest of Kettleman City…
The air we breathe is improving, but there is still a long way to reach the national standard for air cleanness.
In 2013, for the first time in recorded history, the San Joaquin Valley did not record any violations of the hourly ozone standard established under the federal Clean Air Act, according to a study called “California’s Progress Toward Clean Air” released Wednesday. The study includes local and statewide air quality data from 2013.
The San Joaquin Valley exceeded the standard during 281 individual hours in 1996.
It also highlights the progress and challenges left for improving air quality in the San Joaquin Valley…
The California Environmental Protection Agency has released a statewide list of census tracts most burdened by pollution, providing a first-of-its-kind ranking certain to pressure regulators to clean up neighborhoods with long-standing health risks.
Many of the worst pollution pockets identified and mapped by state officials are in the San Joaquin Valley, Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire. Their residents are largely low-income Latinos who have had little power to force improvements in their communities.
By providing the public with an objective accounting of conditions in areas as small as a few thousand residents, Cal/EPA has created a powerful tool to spur regulators to act in highly polluted neighborhoods, state officials and environmental activists say…