Source: http://www.boston.com, December 18, 2013 By: Martin Finucane The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority said today it had approved a $3.1 million settlement of a lawsuit against the consultants, contractors, and suppliers responsible for a section of water main in Weston that suffered a massive failure in May 2010, leaving nearly 2 million people in the […]

Read here about smog that has led to a health alert Utah.  

Read here about a settlement worth over $5 million between Utah and Chevron over a fuel spill.  

Source: The New York Times, December 17, 2013 Posted On: http://fpn.advisen.com The New York City Housing Authority will deal more quickly and more thoroughly with mold in its apartments as part of an agreement by the Bloomberg administration to settle a federal lawsuit by people living in housing projects and coping with asthma. Lawyers for […]

Source: New York Times Online, December 17, 2013 Posted on: http://fpn.advisen.com In 1885, as new engineering inventions were ushering in the era of the skyscraper, lawmakers in New York State enacted a law intended to safeguard construction workers who were finding themselves facing increasing dangers while working at ever-greater heights. That measure, which became known […]

Source: Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2013 Posted on: http://fpn.advisen.com A Northern California judge Monday found three paint companies liable for exposing children to a known poison and ordered them to pay $1.1 billion into a fund to remove lead from inside California homes. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled that […]

Read here about a Kentucky company being sued by neighbors of a power plant who complain of breathing problems and pollution.  

Source: The New York Times, December 15, 2013 Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com The newest environmental threat to the Great Lakes is very, very small. Tiny plastic beads used in hundreds of toiletries like facial scrubs and toothpastes are slipping through water treatment plants and turning up by the tens of millions in the Great Lakes. There, […]

Source: http://envfpn.advisen.com, December 15, 2013 Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com The Environmental Protection Agency will spend the next two months collecting air samples from homes in the Avondale community to determine how serious vapor intrusion is for those Riverside citizens. But in the meantime, residents are worried about their health and property values. The area of concern […]

Source: http://news.yahoo.com, December 13, 2013 By: Nick Brown Anadarko Petroleum Corp and its Kerr-McGee unit acted with “intent to hinder” when they spun off Tronox, the paint materials company that later went bankrupt, and should pay billions of dollars in environmental cleanup costs, a judge ruled on Thursday. The decision, which parties had been awaiting […]

Source: http://www.lexology.com, December 6, 2013 By: Cade J. Laverty and C. Michael Shull III, Frost Brown Todd LLC It is sometimes difficult to tell whose insurer will be liable for certain occurrences on a construction project. The whole purpose of contracting is to allocate risk—hopefully to the party that is better situated to deal with […]

Source: http://www.lexology.com, December 12, 2013 By: Brian Margolies, Traub Lieberman Straus & Shrewsberry LLP In its recent decision in Stoddard Equipment Co., Inc. v. American Safety Indemnity Co., 2013 U.S. Dist. LEIS 170701 (W.D. Mo. Dec. 4, 2013), the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri had occasion to consider whether property […]