Pollution

PICHER, Okla. -- A track hoe sidled up to the modest yellow brick church, paused for a moment to position itself, then drove its teeth into the roof with brutal efficiency.

Shingles tumbled into the sanctuary. With the second blow, the wall buckled. The track hoe worked its way across the building, finally smashing the wall where a simple cross was emblazoned in red brick. Within 20 minutes, the First Baptist Church was rubble, ready to be loaded in waiting dump trucks and hauled away.

Behind the church, a water tower that now serves six households bears the legend "Picher Gorillas since 1918." It touts the mascot of a high school that won a state football championship in 1984, a year after the town was declared a toxic waste site. The school no longer exists.

Picher is a town that had held on through misfortune after misfortune. Now its death is near.

PLEASANT VIEW -- Every city in Utah is required to have a storm water management plan, says City Administrator J.J. Allen, and Pleasant View city engineers have been preparing a plan so an ordinance can be considered in February.

The natural gas boom gripping parts of the U.S. has a nasty byproduct: wastewater so salty, and so polluted with metals like barium and strontium, that most states require drillers to get rid of the stuff by injecting it down shafts thousands of feet deep.

Not in Pennsylvania, one of the states at the center of the gas rush.

RENO, Nev. -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says overall releases of toxic chemicals to the environment by companies in Nevada decreased 8 percent in 2009 compared with the previous year.

OGDEN -- Winter 2010 in Top of Utah has seen its first windstorm, its first blizzard and its first snowstorm, and now it's having its first red air-alert days.

OGDEN -- An admitted exaggeration by a city consultant regarding America First Credit Union's participation in a fundraising campaign for the Ogden River Restoration Project shouldn't impact a $1 million state grant awarded to the municipality, a member of the Utah Water Quality Board said Friday.