Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/tag/pollution/)
A former supervisor of a Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority plant is expected to plead guilty to a felony charge for allegedly ordering employees to discharge sludge into the Allegheny River.
By Eric Freedman
A federal judge has sentenced a Flint, Michigan, polluter to one year behind bars for illegally discharging more than 47 million gallons of untreated waste into the city’s sewer system. Robert Massey, the 70-year-old president and owner of family-owned Oil Chem Inc., pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act over an 8½ year period between 2007 and 2015. “That amounts to over 72 Olympic-size swimming pools. The crime was driven by greed. Oil Chem received over a million dollars to dispose of the (material),” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in its sentencing memorandum to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Davis.
Serious health problems like increasing asthma rates among children in Detroit’s Black and Hispanic communities have been linked to what local organizations call environmental injustices as a result of low air quality and polluted neighborhoods.
Increased ozone emissions in several southern Michigan counties could lead to new motor vehicle maintenance inspections if researchers can’t blame them on western wildfires.
Fertilizer runoff from seasonal heavy rainfall on Midwestern farms is traveling down the Mississippi River and creating a “hypoxic zone,” or low oxygen zone in the Gulf of Mexico, a recent study by Iowa State University scientists warns.
A $2.9 million cleanup of contaminated sediments along the Detroit River will help bring a new look to the Motor City and set the stage for the completion of the Riverwalk by linking two popular waterfront parks.
After more than two decades of cleanup and community efforts, Lake Erie’s Presque Isle Bay became the second heavily contaminated place in the United States to be removed from the Great Lakes toxic waters list.
While microplastics get plenty of attention as a Great Lakes pollutant, researchers say there is not enough information to know if these macroplastic golf balls pose similar harm in freshwater systems.
Her efforts led to bans on microplastics and to the discovery that plastic is ubiquitous throughout the environment.
A river that once caught fire is once again among those under the microscope for pollution pouring into the Great Lakes, researchers say.