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Ohio River Flooding Crosses Boundaries
By Oliver Morrison Anthony Wolkiewicz had his picture taken with Fred Rogers while working at WQED in 1977. Rogers made a special point to ask about Wolkiewicz’s youngest son. “Who is this? I don’t remember him in my neighborhood,” Wolkiewicz remembers him saying in the same voice he used on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It’s sheer…
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Toxic Mercury Remediation in the Ohio River Hampered by Complicated Cleanup
By Jeff Brooks-Gillies Mercury flows through industrial wastewater into the Ohio River, and damages young brains. But the multi-state agency tasked with keeping the waterway clean hasn’t tightened controls on this pollution because it doesn’t have the authority to do so. While coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturers and other facilities along the Ohio River are…
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Analysis of state contracts to plug orphaned wells reveals that cleanup costs might creep into the billions
By Mark Olalde Plugging the myriad orphaned oil and gas wells around Ohio costs, on average, more than $110,000 per well, according to a new analysis of Department of Natural Resources data. The research was pulled from contracts the state awarded in 2019 by the ARO Working Group, a network that studies the decommissioning of…
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Toxic Discharge Data Shows Where Pollutants Leach into the Ohio River, but Enforcement Remains an Issue (With Interactive Map)
By Bonnie Jean Feldkamp All Tim Guilfoile wants to do is fish. Before his retirement, he had two careers: one in business and one in water quality activism. Now, he serves as the director of marketing and communications for Northern Kentucky Fly Fishers. “We fly fish for bass, blue gill, striped bass and others. Not…
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Ohio River rises: The minds behind Louisville’s riverfront revival
By Ryan Van Velzer In Louisville, Kentucky, the Ohio River has something of an image problem. It seems like everything imaginable has ended up in the river at one time or another. There are the usual suspects like plastic bottles, Styrofoam coolers and tires. There are the byproducts of cities and industries: sewage, landfill juice…
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Bipartisan Group of Representatives Introduce Bill After Eye on Ohio Investigation into Property Tax Loophole
This story was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Ohio lawmakers reached across the aisle to introduce a new bill that would close a property tax loophole on commercial property sales in the state. Reps. Mike Skindell (D-13) and Doug Green (R-66) co-sponsored HB449 in late December. The proposed law…
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Behind 'Dark Waters'- the lasting legacy of C8 contamination in the Ohio River Watershed
By Taylor Sisk PARKERSBURG, W. Va. – Tommy Joyce is no cinephile. The last movie he saw in a theater was the remake of “True Grit” nearly a decade ago. “I’d rather watch squirrels run in the woods” than sit through most of what appears on the big screen, he said. But there’s a film…
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