The Calumet Area Hazardous Substance Data Base : A User's Guide with Documentation

HWRIC Project 88/89-055NTIS PB90-25193

Guidelines and Methods for Conducting Porperty Transfer Site Histories

HWRIC Project 90-077NTIS PB91-10508

Historical Industrial Waste Disposal Practices in Winnebago County, Illinois : 1870-1980

NTIS PB87-11886

Industrial wastes in the Calumet area, 1869-1970 : An historical geography

ISM contract 175ENR contract HW-16NTIS PB91-16042

Historical Assessment of Hazardous Waste Management in Madison and St. Clair Counties, Illinois, 1890-1980

HWRIC Project Number HWR88-024NTIS PB89-19714

Cartographic Depictions of Louisiana Land Loss: A Tool for Sustainable Policies

For more than half a century, scientists in Louisiana (USA) have been mapping coastal land loss. Cartographic depictions were initially important to expose potential loss of off-shore oil revenue tied to the retreating shoreline. For the last 40 years, attention has shifted to issues related to preserving a valuable ecology and protecting the coastal society from rising seas and storm surge. This paper reviews 60 years of land loss mapping as a tool to drive public policy directed at preserving and restoring the state’s coastal wetlands. It highlights the power of visualizations in fostering public awareness in an environmental crisis and their value in motivating more sustainable public policies. It also provides a critique of the shifting emphasis in the public narrative away from the factual history of land loss to imagined future losses

Shifting Definitions of Hazardous Wastes

This paper addresses the emergence of concern with hazardous wastes and the legal liabilities attached to them long before the first federal legislation in the U.S. explicitly using the term; a simultaneous search for marketable by-products during the first three quarters of the twentieth century as a means to decrease the volume of wastes while also diminishing the perceived threat; and the eventual adoption of a legal tactic that asserted absence of liability before formal federal definitions of hazardous wastes. Based on a review of industry and waste management literature, it exposes deliberate efforts on the part of major industry trade organizations to dampen public calls for litigation by making the case that wastes were manageable, recoverable, and non-threatening. These steps sought to offset potential disruptions to their operations by imposing additional costs on waste treatment. When federal legislation became a reality in the 1970s, defenders of industrial practices that created hundreds of hazardous waste sites made the arguments that hazardous properties of wastes were unknown at the time of their disposal. The litigation that swirled around the federal laws proved disruptive and reflect a issue delayed not eliminated

Rivers Flood Regularly During Hurricanes, But Get Less Attention Than Coastlines

Hurricane Florence, now a tropical depression, has dropped record-setting rainfall on parts of North Carolina. Many river gauges show waterways above flood stage. Flash and long-term flooding, as well as a risk of landslides, are expected to continue for days

An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis called an impossible but inevitable city. How New Orleans came to be, taking shape between the mutual and often contradictory forces of nature and urban development, is the subject of An Unnatural Metropolis. Craig E. Colten traces engineered modifications to New Orleans\u27s natural environment from 1800 to 2000. Before the city could swell in size and commercial importance as its nineteenth-century boosters envisioned, builders had to wrest it from its waterlogged site, protect it from floods, expel disease, and supply basic services using local resources. Colten shows how every manipulation of the environment made an impact on the city\u27s social geography as well - often with unequal, adverse consequences for minorities - and how each still requires maintenance and improvement today. For example, while the massive levee system has controlled the unpredictable Mississippi, it also captures heavy down-pours, creating a new set of internal flood problems.https://repository.lsu.edu/facultybooks/1598/thumbnail.jp