California Senator Barbara Boxer is using her new chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) to shine a light on perchlorate, a residue of rocket fuel that was used for decades, most notably on military bases and defense industrial sites. The Natural Resources News Service claims some of the credit for revealing the dangers of perchlorate.

The public had never heard of the military pollutant until NRNS broke several stories about the toxin in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in 2001 and helped WSJ reporter Peter Waldman with several follow-up stories about it in 2002 and 2003.

A 59-year-old San Antonio woman, Mary Lou Ornelias, featured in a Los Angeles Times series about trichloroethylene pollution died Sept. 3.  Ornelias' doctor attributed her death to liver cancer. 

The March 30, 2006, story by Ralph Vartabedian was based on work of NRNS.  It told how the Pentagon had blocked federal regulations that would clean up pollution from TCE, another name for trichloroethylene. 

A lawsuit filed by the Oklahoma Attorney General against Arkansas poultry farms over pollution of the Illinois River is one of many new interstate environmental disputes growing out of relaxed federal enforcement.  State and local governments increasingly reach beyond their borders to control pollution that they say the federal government should have prevented.

This controversy is detailed in an August 28 Washington Post story by Juliet Eilperin.  The Natural Resources News Service developed the idea for the story and provided examples of interstate environmental disputes to the Post.

Oklahoma’s complaint, filed last year, seeks injunctive and monetary relief from 14 large food processing companies in Arkansas. Oklahoma says the companies dispose of poultry waste by piling it on fields in large amounts that belie their claim that it is meant to be fertilizer.  “They’re not fertilizing; they’re dumping,” Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson told Eilperin.

The National Research Council has vindicated victims of one of the Defense Department’s worstenvironmental problems.An expert panel of NRC scientists reported that trichloroethylene, the most common water contaminant in America, is more dangerous than earlier thought.

Today’s report warned that the powerful solvent is a serious public health threat that needs stronger regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We need a new drinking water standard now, with no more delays,” said Jerry Ensminger, a retired Marine drill instructor whose 9-year-old daughter Janey (pictured right) died of leukemia in 1985 after exposure to TCE in the water at Camp Lejeune.

As Ralph Vartabedian reported in today’s Los Angeles Times, the lengthy review by the NRC committee concluded that EPA was right in 2001 when it proposed tighter limits on TCE, which is both the No. 1 water contaminant in the nation and a widespread air pollutant.

The Bush administration Energy Department attacked a Montana plan to control water pollution from gas drilling in Montana and upstream states, according to an April 9 Washington Post story. The story also disclosed that the administration suppressed an EPA draft study that concluded the pollution controls would not cost much. The story resulted from ideas and information developed by the Natural Resources News Service. Montana says it will protect its waters without regard for the objections from Washington.

The Pentagon and the EPA are locked in a multi-billion-dollar struggle unseen by the public until today over the danger to millions of Americans posed by a deadly carcinogen called TCE that saturated the country during decades when it was thought benign.

Most Americans knew little about TCE or the war within the United States government over how to deal with it, even though it’s the most common water contaminant and one of the most insidious air pollutants in the nation. That started to change today when the Los Angeles Times exposed the high-stakes conflict raging since 2001, when the EPA declared in a little-noticed draft study that TCE is far more poisonous than previously believed. [Update: Two stories, one on victims of TCE, and one on TCE problems in California, ran on March 30th, 2006.]