Pollution

An environmental group sued PacifiCorp and California's wildlife agency Tuesday over claims that a Klamath River fish hatchery is releasing pollution that is deadly to fish downstream. Klamath Riverkeeper, part of an alliance headed by environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., filed suit in U.S. District Court in Sacramento alleging discharges from the hatchery violated the Clean Water Act. At issue is the hatchery at the Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath near the Oregon border.

The growth blueprint for San Bernardino County, which projects a 25% increase in population by 2030, fails to adequately assess the effects of increased greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, California's attorney general alleges in a lawsuit seeking to have the plan thrown out. In a suit filed Thursday in San Bernardino County Superior Court, Atty. Gen.

Chevron Corp. shareholders rejected a proposal requiring a report on whether laws in countries where the oil and gas producer operates are adequate to protect human health, the environment and its own reputation. As about 40 demonstrators outside the company's headquarters called on Chevron to protect the environment in oil-producing nations, Chief Executive Dave O'Reilly said at the annual meeting Wednesday that it had done nothing wrong in a dispute in Ecuador.

Members of indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon region sued Occidental Petroleum Corp. on Thursday, claiming the oil company's operations caused pollution that has sickened residents and killed a 6-year-old boy. The potential class-action lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, was brought by Tomas Maynas Carijano, identified as a spiritual leader among the Achuar people in northeastern Peru, and 24 others who were not identified by name.

More than 200 chemicals -- many found in urban air and everyday consumer products -- cause breast cancer in animal tests, according to a compilation of scientific reports published today. Writing in a publication of the American Cancer Society, researchers concluded that reducing exposure to the compounds could prevent many women from developing the disease.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday to consider banning plastic foam food containers from restaurants and stores in unincorporated areas because they add to the region's mounting pollution problem. At the urging of Supervisors Yvonne B.

A grim-faced George AuClair Jr. wandered his 25-acre patch of desert looking every inch the broken man. "I'm ashamed of what happened here, but you can't lie about it," said the Torres Martinez tribal member. "You have to own up when you do wrong." Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair's illegal dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines. AuClair's site isn't unusual.

Researchers predict that the oxygen-depleted "dead zone" that recurs off the Louisiana coast will expand this summer to 8,543 square miles -- its largest area in at least 22 years. The forecast, released Monday by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is based on a federal estimate of nitrogen compounds from the Mississippi River watershed that will reach the Gulf of Mexico. It discounts any effect storms might have.

From a public relations standpoint, it didn't look good. In the space of less than a month, China had quashed two potentially embarrassing environmental reports that would have said what most people already know: This is a country facing a costly and increasingly deadly environmental crisis.

Boeing Co. faces a nearly $500,000 fine for allegedly allowing excessive levels of lead, mercury and other toxins to flow from its Santa Susana Field Lab in Ventura County into surrounding canyons and the Los Angeles River, regulators said Thursday.