For years, neighbors of a recycling plant and scrap metal yard in South Camden have complained about repeated fires at the facilities that have pumped noxious black smoke into that part of the city, causing explosions that could be heard downtown and in some cases forced evacuations.
A Camden-based environmental nonprofit is now questioning whether the company is in fact a recycling center as it maintains threats to sue the city and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for not protecting residents’ health. The Center for Environmental Transformation has filed a complaint with the DEP, accusing EMR of being dishonest about what their facilities actually do. EMR maintain they are a recycling center and that they do not accept solid waste, which would subject them to more regulations.
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In his boyhood, Tom Fote cast his lines off the piers of Brooklyn. Today, he is a treasure chest of information about the species of fish that run off the New Jersey coast and how climate change is directing where you’ll find them.
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More than 100 black vultures were found dead on a North Jersey trail due to bird flu, state officials said.
The deaths occurring off the Sussex Branch Trail in Lafayette in Sussex County date back to early August, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Black vultures are seemingly very susceptible to Avian Influenza, and they tend to scavenge the carcasses of dead vultures, which can prolong the duration of a local outbreak such as the one being seen in Sussex County, officials said.
The birds have been left to decompose on site due to rough terrain causing accessibility issues and a lack of personnel in the State certified to handle infected birds. Improper handling can lead to further spread of disease.
The risk of avian influenza being transmitted to people is extremely low. The New Jersey Department of Agriculture and NJ DEP Fish and Wildlife are monitoring the situation. For questions regarding poultry please contact the NJ Department of Agriculture ((609) 671-6400).
This was the message from acting state Attorney General Matt Platkin and state Commissioner of Environmental Protection Shawn LaTourette this week as they announced environmental justice lawsuits.
The push is aimed especially in the state’s most vulnerable communities, with six of the lawsuits focused on sites in Newark, Linden, Ewing, Rahway, Elmwood Park Borough, and Middlesex Borough.
These areas are now considered “overburdened communities,” which the state defines as at least 35% low-income, at least 40% people of color, or at least 40% residents with limited English proficiency.
The seventh lawsuit is against a Hammonton blueberry farm with allegedly unsafe drinking-water wells where its migrant employees live and work.
“In New Jersey, we are confronting the historic injustices that have burdened low-income and minority communities with a disproportionate amount of pollution,” LaTourette said in a statement.
“Our commitment to furthering the promise of environmental justice sometimes demands that we take legal action to correct the legacy of pollution that underserved communities have endured. Lawsuits like those we are announcing today are an important message to polluters: treat every New Jersey community as though it were your own by leaving your neighbors and their environment better than you found them.”
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The city wants the building, administrator George Savastano told City Council on Thursday. He said there is no specific use in mind yet but that the city has begun talks with a trustee appointed by a bankruptcy court to begin negotiations.
The next step will be to evaluate the condition of the building, a procedure Savastano described as due diligence.
“The administration considers this property to be extremely worthy of consideration for acquisition given its prime location within our downtown,” Savastano said. “While there are not definitive ideas yet for what the ultimate purpose of the property would be, it clearly presents a number of options if it were to come into the public domain.”
For Alaska salmon fishing, the summer of 2022 is the best of times and the worst of times.
Fresh sockeye salmon, also called red salmon, is on sale on July 19 at Anchorage’s New Sagaya City Market. The Bristol Bay region has the world’s biggest sockeye salmon runs and is enjoying a record return this summer.(Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of Monday, the run had totaled over 73.7 million, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish.
But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever season.
The number of Chinook counted by sonar while swimming up the river at Pilot Station, a village near the Bering Sea coast, was the lowest on record for this time of the year, the department said. Things are looking grim for the rest of the summer, Fish and Game said in its most recent update; “the drainage-wide run may be under 50,000 fish, which is so small that escapement goals may not be met in any tributaries,” the update said. Chinook fishing has been closed all along the river and its drainages.
The chum salmon run, which starts in the late summer, is also looking grim and “is anticipated to be critically low,” meaning that even subsistence harvests will be closed for at least the start of the fall season, the department said.
Fisheries activists are pointing to both cases as evidence supporting the protective measures, for which they are campaigning.
Opponents of the controversial Pebble Mine say two consecutive years of record sockeye runs demonstrate the value of protecting the Bristol Bay watershed, site of the world’s biggest sockeye runs, from that proposed development. They are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands-fill permit for the mine.
Salmon hang to dry on a rack at Lake Clark National Park in 2018. Lake Clark is part of the Bristol Bay region. (National Park Service)
“Salmon have provided for the people of Bristol Bay for thousands of years due to our ancestral stewardship of our pristine lands and waters. We’re grateful our salmon continue to return home in record numbers but our watershed is still facing the grave threat of mines like Pebble. Bristol Bay remains a salmon stronghold and will only continue if it is permanently protected. The EPA must finalize Clean Water Act protections for the headwaters of our fishery this year,” United Tribes of Bristol Bay executive director Alannah Hurley said in a statement.
Advocates for Indigenous communities dependent on Yukon River salmon, meanwhile, say the continued poor returns there and in the Kuskokwim River demonstrate the need for action to reduce cases of ocean bycatch, the accidental harvest of Western Alaska-bound salmon in nets used to harvest other species.
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