Eleven-year old Derek Uphus fears the start of school each year because that’s when local farmers near his Spokane, Wash., home begin burning their fields and fouling the air over the city. He suffers from cystic fibrosis and asthma and when there’s smoke in the air, Uphus coughs constantly. “It’s like someone’s hands are around […]
Climate change
Posted inSeptember 29, 1997: The timber wars evolve into a divisive attempt at peace
Park may get trashy neighbor
EAGLE MOUNTAIN, Calif. – Once home to 4,000 people and the largest iron ore mine west of the Mississippi, this desert community now features boarded-up tract homes. Yet every five blocks or so a few houses show signs of life, and down one street, prisoners in orange jumpsuits have just finished building a new playground. […]
Posted inSeptember 1, 1997: Radioactive waste from Hanford is seeping toward the Columbia
Floods hammer Southwest
A moving wall of water following a severe thunderstorm Aug. 10 forced residents and tourists in a Havasupai Indian village outside Grand Canyon National Park to evacuate. Two days later, thunderstorms southeast of Page, Ariz., near Glen Canyon Dam, pushed a flash flood down a slot canyon, where it drowned 11 hikers. “It was chocolate […]
Posted inJuly 7, 1997: While the New West booms, Wyoming mines, drills ... and languishes
The West weathers unusually wet times
With a huge snowpack in the high country threatening severe floods this spring, Westerners prepared for the worst. They beefed up dikes and levees and stockpiled sandbags in anticipation of the big melt (HCN, 5/22/97). But for most, the worst never came. Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Mount Zirkel’s acid trip
Two Colorado power plants are cleaning up their act, but it may be a case of too little too late. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey studying the Mount Zirkel Wilderness near Steamboat Springs, Colo., have found that air pollution from coal-burning power plants in the towns of Hayden and Craig harms wildlife. The plants […]
Posted inMay 26, 1997: The sacred and profane collide in the West
Uh, oh – the glaciers are growing
Whitefish, Mont. – Bundled against the driving snow of another January blizzard, the regulars stomped into the Buffalo Cafe for their morning brew. The Flathead Valley was on the verge of exceeding the annual snowfall record with almost three winter months to go. The steamy cafe buzzed with chatter about aching backs, collapsed roofs and […]
Posted inMay 12, 1997: Planning under the gun: Cleaning up Lake Tahoe proves to be a dirty business
The West braces for the big melt
The West is shaking off one of the wettest winters ever, and the snow keeps falling. Instead of April showers, a spring blizzard hit Wyoming early in the month, killing thousands of cattle and sheep trapped in fence-line snowdrifts. Record snowpacks are piled up in the high country, aided by late April storms: Parts of […]
Posted inApril 28, 1997: Evangelical Christians preach a green gospel
Montana train accident derailed a small town
Alberton, Mont. – When sirens pierced the air before dawn last April 11, Lucinda Hodges awoke to find workers in Haz-Mat suits scrambling through the streets in a thick, white fog. Then it hit her. “I’ll never forget that feeling,” she says. “You breathe and there’s no air. You felt like you were suffocating.” In […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Cars kill trees
Scientists in California say the evidence is compelling: Air pollution from the fast-growing San Joaquin Valley is responsible for killing thousands of trees in the nearby Sierra Nevadas. The chief culprit is ozone, a pollutant created when exhaust from power plants or cars mixes with hydrocarbons in the presence of sunlight, say federal researchers and […]
Posted inApril 14, 1997: Beauty and the Beast
Burning for a buck
It sounds like an easy way to make a few dollars: Gather up coils of old industrial-gauge wire, pile it in the desert, douse it with diesel and burn off the rubber and lead insulation. The raw copper left behind brings 80 cents to a dollar per pound. The trouble is, it’s illegal and a […]
Posted inMarch 17, 1997: Working the Watershed
No nagging or preaching here
Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, Northwest Environment Watch, 1997. 86 pages, illus. $9.95 paperback. When was the last time you heard an environmentalist complain that we’re recycling too much? No street-corner shouter or mealymouthed apologist, John Ryan is the sober, credentialed research director of Seattle-based Northwest […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 1997: No home on the range
When it’s 25 below and dropping
I was playing poker the other day with a bunch of guys, mostly middle-aged and older, mostly native Montanans like myself. Every so often somebody would put on an extra coat, go outside and start the car, come back to play a few hands, then bundle up and turn the engine off. Nobody found this […]
Posted inFebruary 3, 1997: Bringing back the bighorn
Utah takes waste that Arizona rejected
Chalk one up for the little guy. After four months of pressuring the Environmental Protection Agency and garbage giant Waste Management Inc., environmentalists in Arizona and California have scored a major victory. Trainloads of DDT-contaminated mud from a San Francisco Bay Superfund site are no longer headed to Waste Management’s landfill in Mobile, Ariz., a […]
Posted inJanuary 20, 1997: Bees under siege
The West awakes to ‘weird’ weather
Christmas brought some of the strangest weather Westerners can remember. First came snow and ice in Idaho so heavy that power poles snapped like twigs and a gymnasium roof collapsed. Then the “pineapple express’ arrived, a blast of warm air from Hawaii that sent temperatures soaring into the 70s. That sent melting snow crashing into […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
County trashes waste plan
Elmore County, Idaho, residents voted overwhelmingly this past election to allow the continued shipment of out-of-state nuclear wastes to a site 200 miles to the east of them. But they are putting their foot down on a plan to place the state’s largest landfill in their backyard. The planning and zoning commission decided to deny […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Clean air for a price
Owners of the Centralia Coal Plant in Washington want as much as $80 million in state tax breaks to stop polluting the air over Mount Rainier National Park and Mount Saint Helens National Monument. Although the Clean Air Act requires the coal plant to install state-of-the-art scrubbers worth $300 million, officials at PacifiCorp, the primary […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Recycling gets rapped
Is recycling really a stupid idea driven by people too willing to believe that their minute actions can change a culture built on conspicuous consumption? Writing in the New York Times Magazine June 30, John Tierney answers “yes.” In fact, he says, “Recycling is garbage.” Citing studies by conservative think tanks such as the Cato […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
For more information
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. The TRI is available in several formats. Many public libraries have the report. Individuals can access it using on-line computer databases or purchase it on CD-ROM or on computer diskettes. For data-use assistance, call 202/260-1531 or fax to 202/260-4659. EPA also maintains a national technical […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
The filthy West
Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Posted inSeptember 16, 1996: The filthy West: Toxics pour into our air, water, land
Top 20 polluters
Note: This article is a sidebar to a feature story. Rank | Company | Location | Air/Water/Land Total lbs. released 1 Magnesium Corp. of America Rowley, Utah 55.7 million 2 ASARCO Inc. East Helena, MT 43.6 million 3 Courtaulds Fibers Inc. Axis, AL 33.4 million 4 IMC-Agrico Co. Mulberry, FL 25.7 million 5 Lenzing Fibers […]