Source: http://www.elkintribune.com By: Wendy Wood This week, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed motions to allow seven local conservation groups to participate in state court enforcement actions against Duke Energy’s illegal coal ash pollution throughout North Carolina. The motion was filed on behalf of groups dedicated to protecting public waters across North Carolina, from […]

Read here about potential exposures to water from coal in the West Virginia chemical spill.

Source: http://www.democratandchronicle.com, January 17, 2014 By: Meaghan M. McDermott A contractor’s mistake burst a storage tank inside a county building at Northampton Park in late December, spilling more than 200 gallons of fuel oil into the basement, where some of it was pumped out to nearby Salmon Creek. According to the state Department of Environmental […]

Read here about a company filing for bankruptcy after it was blamed for a chemical spill in West Virginia.

Source: http://xlgroup.com As the United States has slowly recovered from the bursting of the real estate bubble in the late 2000’s, the  acquisition activity by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) has started to defy the odds. Even with an uptick in interest rates, buying of commercial, office, retail, and industrial properties continued on an upward […]

Source: Trenton Times (NJ), January 15, 2013 Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com A chemical spill that left 300,000 people in West Virginia unable to drink their water is reviving calls for more stringent regulation of thousands of chemical storage sites in the United States, especially those near water supplies. The Freedom Industries Inc. complex in Charleston that […]

Source: http://www.aspen.co, January 15, 2014 By: Kenneth Cornell We review the oil and gas industry’s flood risk and the potential for environmental losses following catastrophic storms. CATASTROPHE COVER There has been much discussion regarding the increasing frequency and intensity of storms around the world. While both underwriters and insurance buyers are concerned with exposure to […]

Source: http://ca.news.yahoo.com, January 12, 2014 By: Scott Sonner A federal lawsuit accusing the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority of polluting the alpine lake with debris from Fourth of July and Labor Day fireworks says the tourism agency and its contractor should be subject to up to $75 million in fines. Joseph and Joan Truxler of Zephyr […]

Source: http://www.jsonline.com, December 5, 2013 By: Lee Bergquist and Kevin Crowe To paraphrase Shakespeare, would manure by any other name smell as sweet? For the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, that was the question. Here’s the dilemma: Dairy farmers Robert and Jane Falk of West Bend consider the manure produced by their 600-cow herd a valuable […]

Read here about a water ban that has been lifted after a chemical spill contaminated the water supply for days.

Source: http://www.ibamag.com, January 10, 2014 By: Caitlin Bronson The standard take on environmental insurance is that companies only purchase it when required, making it a niche product without a lot of payoff for producers. However, as more companies start to understand their emerging risks—and environmental-related coverage under ageneral liability policies remains in a state of […]

Source: http://shalestuff.com, January 11, 2014 By: Luke Johnson A new study has found that a majority of Americans have very little understanding of the hydraulic fracturing process, and the few that do are roughly split in support and opposition to the unconventional oil and gas extraction process. In a survey conducted in September 2012 by […]