ON MARCH 4, a lawyer for Bullseye Glass emailed the state Department of Justice and Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to ask to start using trivalent chromium (Cr III). For weeks, Bullseye had been forced to stop using chromium—both the rampant carcinogen hexavalent chromium (Cr VI) and its relatively benign cousin, Cr III. And, according […]
Bio Hazard
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Chromium Levels Remain High In SE Portland, Even Without Glass Factory Emissions
Outside of Bullseye Glass’s SE Portland factory. Levels of chromium in Southeast Portland’s air remain above state benchmarks, despite not being used by a local glass factory, state environmental officials now say. In a release this morning, the state Department of Environmental Quality announced it’s hoping to pinpoint the source of hexavalent chromium (the hazardous […]
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Ted Wheeler Is Now “Leaning” Toward Local Air Regulations. He Wasn’t Last Week.
Doug Brown Portland mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler now says he’d tentatively support creating a local air authority to regulate polluters, after news emerged this week that the state of Oregon should have been requiring strong protections at Portland glass factories for years, but didn’t know it. “I took some heat early on for accusing the […]
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DEQ: Bullseye Glass Will Resume Melting Cadmium, After Installing New Pollution Control
After weeks of voluntarily suspending the metal amid public outcry, Bullseye Glass is burning cadmium again. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality tonight tweeted out a notice it received from the Southeast Portland art glass factory. It says Bullseye has installed a “baghouse” pollution control device that can catch particulates before they enter nearby air. […]
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Now The EPA’s Delaying Plans To Clean Up The Portland Harbor. That Could Be A Problem.
The US Environmental Protection Agency is pushing back by weeks a long-anticipated proposal for cleaning up the toxic Portland Harbor. In a statement issued Wednesday evening, EPA spokesperson Mark MacIntyre said the plan’s release might be pushed back to early May. “To meet our legal obligations under Superfund, we must modify our timeline for delivering […]
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Polluters—the City Included—Have Filed A Massive Records Request That Some Worry Will Delay Willamette River Cleanup
A little less than a month ago, as the US Environmental Protection Agency was working to complete a complex plan for cleaning up Portland’s toxic harbor, a group of polluters responsible dropped a mammoth request on the agency. On March 9, an attorney for the Lower Willamette Group, a collection of 14 polluters that includes […]
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Surprise! Now That Glass Factories Have Stopped Burning Heavy Metals, The Air Is Cleaner
Windows at Uroboros Glass’s North Portland facility After more than a month of surprising revelations about heavy metal emissions at Portland art glass factories, state officials offered some very unsurprising findings today: Once factories ceased burning cadmium, arsenic, and chromium, the carcinogens ceased to register at eye-popping levels. For the second week in a row, […]
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State Officials Say Soil Near SE Portland’s Bullseye Glass Is Safe
Michelle Mitchell If you live around the corner from Bullseye Glass, the state says you can take that trowel off the shelf. Dozens of soil tests taken at properties around Bullseye detected occasional spikes in several heavy metals, but overall averages were too low to raise health concerns, state health and environmental officials said this […]
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The Pacific Northwest’s Maritime Entrances Are Closed
If you were planning on taking any foolhardy boating excursions this weekend, it looks like you’ll have to reenact scenes from The Perfect Storm some other time. The Coast Guard decided today to close all maritime entrances to the Pacific Northwest due to the non-stop deluge we’re currently enjoying experiencing, which has churned up a […]
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Fennica or No, Shell’s Halting Its Arctic Drilling Ambitions
Dirk VanderHart Greenpeace activists dangling from the St. Johns Bridge in late July Mother nature might have finished what 13 bridge danglers helped kickstart in late July. Royal Dutch Shell says it’s abandoning drilling operations in the Arctic, “for the foreseeable future.” From the New York Times: The decision came after the Burger J well, […]
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The City’s Going to Battle Its Second-Biggest Power Company Over Renewable Energy
Kenneth Huey City staffers weren’t mincing words last month when it came to defending solar and wind power development in Oregon. As we report in this week’s Mercury, Portland-based Pacific Power is pushing for new rules many feel would kill renewable energy development in Oregon, and people in the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability […]
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Okay, Now The Entire State’s Locked in A “Severe Drought”
US Drought Monitor Orange means “Severe Drought.” Red means “Extreme Drought.” Both mean we’re screwed. Here’s something to ponder as you prepare to be fried by temps above 100 degrees and Portland demonstrators fight to keep an oil ship from plundering the Arctic: the entire state of Oregon is now experiencing severe drought for the […]