Southwest (AZ NM OK TX)

A July 19 fire at Citgo's Corpus Christi refinery released deadly hydrogen fluoride, maimed one worker, and threatened a poor, largely minority community at its fenceline. Now larger questions are being asked -- about how authorities responded to it and whether it could have been prevented.

"Sierra Club and Environment Texas filed an air pollution lawsuit today in federal district court against Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LP. The groups claim that Chevron Phillips has repeatedly violated the Clean Air Act at its Cedar Bayou chemical plant in Baytown, Texas."

"As the hot days in Texas get even hotter, it may just be too much for some birds and fish. From the American goldfinch to the gray snapper, some species have been moving north for years, searching for cooler ground. And their quest may someday lead them to migrate out of the state -- forever -- especially if climate change continues to make Texas warmer, as predicted."

After years of complaints, federal agents raided the CES Environmental Services waste-processing facility in southeast Houston.

Arizona's groundwater addiction hasn't been controlled by legal and regulatory measures so far, and may soon threaten the state's economic well-being.

Homes are "contaminated with potentially dangerous levels of uranium from the days of the cold war, when hundreds of uranium mines dotted the vast tribal land known as the Navajo Nation."

An abandoned river -- the Trinity -- runs through Dallas. Storms wash old industrial poisons into it via ditches. As poisons accumulated in its sediments, fish became dangerous to eat. "So people stayed away, and over time, it no longer mattered which came first -- the toxic fish or the abandoned river."

"Thirty years ago today, an earthen tailings dam near the United Nuclear Corp. Church Rock Uranium mine collapsed, spilling ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes into the Rio Puerco. The spill contaminated water, land and air at least 50 miles downstream on Navajo Nation land in New Mexico and Arizona."