The long-awaited list of the California state parks slated for closure, due to a $33 million budget shortfall through the 2013 fiscal year, was finally released last Friday. Officials announced that 70 parks out of 278 will be closed, and among them are some of the Bay Area’s most well-known campgrounds. If the park’s...
Read more »
Way Out West will be offline for the next week. We’re taking a little break for some journalism training through a California Endowment Health Reporting Fellowship that we received this winter. The fellowship will help us produce what we hope will be an in-depth and interesting package of stories about California’s green chemistry laws....
Read more »
EDITORIAL – It’s like the Oscars for the Patagonia set. Every April, just before Earth Day, San Francisco’s environmental community comes together at the city’s Opera House to laud six grassroots activists from around the globe, whose stories enrage and inspire. The Goldman Environmental Prize offers recipients $150,000 to use as they see fit...
Read more »
Just as farmers markets are swinging into full bloom, there’s very disturbing news about radiation from Japan reaching new levels in Europe. And if it’s high there, it’s significantly higher along the West Coast. A French research organization that monitors radiation, CRIIRAD, says the risk of exposure to the radioisotope iodine-131 has risen from...
Read more »
PG&E has proposed charging residential customers to opt out of having wireless transmission of electric meters turned off at their homes. The proposal announced Thursday would allow the utility to recoup the expenses it says are associated with running an opt-out program by charging participating customers. The utility has come up with a rate...
Read more »
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced on Tuesday that trace amounts of radiation from Japanese nuclear reactors continue to be found in West Coast monitors. Results from RadNet filters in San Francisco, Anaheim, Riverside, and Seattle show three new types of radioactive isotopes previously unreported to the public. They include Cesium-137, Tellurium-132, Iodine-132, and...
Read more »
A Muni light-rail vehicle was struck by a big rig Monday morning, injuring six people, according to San Francisco Fire Department spokeswoman Lieutenant Mindy Talmadge, in an incident that highlights the rancorous debate happening right now at the state level concerning the city’s transport safety. The California Public Utilities Commission is weighing a decision...
Read more »
Did you know that sleeping next to someone blitzes you with 0.05 millionth of a sievert of radiation per night? That eating a banana gives you 0.1 millionth, and that a day’s dose at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant would give you .0036 sieverts? For some great perspective on the doses of radiation and...
Read more »
As the public searches for answers about radiation from Japan’s growing nuclear crisis reaching the United States, they are turning to the Environmental Protection Agency’s RadNet Central Data Exchange, which makes nationwide radiation levels available multiple times a day. But the data requires expert interpretation and could further confuse and worry novices trying to...
Read more »
California health and emergency officials said a “plume” of radiation coming from the Japanese nuclear crisis that’s expected to hit the West Coast as early as tomorrow will bring radiation levels to no higher than normal background levels. The officials from the California Department of Public Health and the California Emergency Management Agency said...
Read more »
Federal and state officials have been staunchly insistent that radioactive fallout from Japan’s nuclear reactor crisis will not reach California and the rest of the West Coast. But there’s been little ability for the public to gain more detailed information on airborne radiation levels because data from federal monitoring stations are difficult to obtain and...
Read more »
The Environmental Protection Agency currently operates 12 radiation monitors in California and two in Hawaii, but announced yesterday that it will deploy an undisclosed number of additional monitors. The EPA’s silence on where and how many of the monitors will be added, riled the Sierra Club, which asked for more information. Public concern over...
Read more »
