Water & Oceans

"MANDAREE, N.D. — Growing up, Ruth Anna Buffalo would follow the dirt track behind her house into the rugged North Dakota badlands, swimming in creeks picketed with beaver dams, finding artifacts and climbing bluffs overlooking Lake Sakakawea. For the young, the lake and the land around it were a wonderland."

"DALLAS -- Texas has stopped inspecting 44% of the dams in the state, following passage last year of a state law that exempted most privately owned dams from safety requirements. Now, as a drought dries up large portions of the Southwest, some dam-safety experts and officials are questioning the law, saying the dry spell is leaving webs of cracks along the surface of earthen dams that may make them weaker—and prone to triggering floods—when rains eventually fill them up again."

"Around 1 million gallons of saltwater has leaked from a North Dakota pipeline, some of it into a bay that leads to a lake that provides drinking water for an American Indian reservation, company and tribe officials said Wednesday."

"Oil that matches the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been found in the bodies of sickened fish, according to a team of Florida scientists who studied the oil's chemical composition."

"Across 685 miles of beaches from North Carolina to Mississippi, loggerhead sea turtles now swim in federally protected waters."

"A study by the National Institutes of Health found that levels of arsenic similar to what some people consume in water caused cancer in male mice"

"WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency, admitting that 'we haven’t had the best relationship with the agriculture industry in the past,' is beginning a push for a proposed new water rule that has generated strong opposition from farm communities."

"A federal agency has fined the company that spilled chemicals into West Virginia's largest water supply $11,000 for a pair of violations."