Environmental Engineering & Toxicology

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.

Furthering the State’s continued efforts to address the effects of climate change, California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird today announced the appointment of 14 leaders in state climate science and infrastructure design to the Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group. ... Through its deliberations, the working group will investigate:

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

YOU HAVE NO real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier–it may, in fact, be the norm—but because no one has enough data to say for sure. ...

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Living on the edge of urban sprawl in Los Angeles inevitably means dealing with the wild creatures who have lived here for thousands of years before homes were built, including rodents. But using anticoagulant rodenticide to control the rat and mouse population around homes can expose pets and local wildlife to this deadly poison, writes Fellow Nancy Steele.

Women in Comms capped off a productive, insightful and fun afternoon spent discussing the future of technology and the progress being made for women in the industry by recognizing two women who are leading the charge on technology and making a material difference for women in comms. Congratulations to the our newest 2017 Leading Lights: Most Inspiring Woman in Comms: Heather Kirksey, Executive Director, Open Platform for NFV Project Inc.