Climate change

BIG SKY, Mont. – For years, this posh resort community of 2,500 people leaked partially treated sewage into the pristine waters of the Gallatin River, the blue-ribbon trout stream in Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It. In 1991 alone, an estimated 47 million gallons of effluent seeped illegally into the groundwater that feeds […]

CASPER, Wyo. – Clad from head to toe in sterile white clothing, environmental engineers have become a familiar sight in this central Wyoming city of 51,000. They come to clean up the defunct Amoco Corp. oil refinery, one of the state’s oldest, and one of its most notorious, hazardous-waste sites. During its boom years in […]

POCATELLO, Idaho – At the foot of the bare-faced Portneuf Mountains, plumes of white smoke issue from a cluster of smokestacks at FMC Corp.” s phosphorous plant, often obscuring the view of motorists passing by on Interstate 84. And charcoal-colored slag flanks the factory’s sides. The 1,400-acre Pocatello plant, first opened in 1949, is North […]

WILLISTON, N.D. – An empty warehouse, a crooked smokestack and a few tons of hazardous waste in a decayed industrial district on the edge of town are all that remain of a company that five years ago opened to fanfare. This isolated Missouri River town of 14,000 people on the northern prairie had welcomed Dakota […]

El Nino’s wrath hit sporadically around the West this winter, leaving more headlines than it did snow or rain. But where it hit, it hit hard, and punches are still being thrown. Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted El Nino would force the global jet streams north, causing warmer and drier weather […]

Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to a back-page opinion piece, “We can have electricity, jobs and clean air.” Hard by the Colorado River at Laughlin, Nev., Southern California Edison’s controversial Mohave power plant began generating electricity in 1971. Its 500-foot stack throws a giant plume into […]

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. – South of Las Vegas, Nev., the Mohave Generating Station remains the last coal-fired power plant in the Southwest to resist installing pollution controls. Now, the plant, one of the largest sulfur dioxide polluters in the West and a significant polluter of the Grand Canyon, sits in the crosshairs of the federal […]

Eleven-year old Derek Uphus fears the start of school each year because that’s when local farmers near his Spokane, Wash., home begin burning their fields and fouling the air over the city. He suffers from cystic fibrosis and asthma and when there’s smoke in the air, Uphus coughs constantly. “It’s like someone’s hands are around […]

EAGLE MOUNTAIN, Calif. – Once home to 4,000 people and the largest iron ore mine west of the Mississippi, this desert community now features boarded-up tract homes. Yet every five blocks or so a few houses show signs of life, and down one street, prisoners in orange jumpsuits have just finished building a new playground. […]

A moving wall of water following a severe thunderstorm Aug. 10 forced residents and tourists in a Havasupai Indian village outside Grand Canyon National Park to evacuate. Two days later, thunderstorms southeast of Page, Ariz., near Glen Canyon Dam, pushed a flash flood down a slot canyon, where it drowned 11 hikers. “It was chocolate […]

With a huge snowpack in the high country threatening severe floods this spring, Westerners prepared for the worst. They beefed up dikes and levees and stockpiled sandbags in anticipation of the big melt (HCN, 5/22/97). But for most, the worst never came. Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in […]

The West is shaking off one of the wettest winters ever, and the snow keeps falling. Instead of April showers, a spring blizzard hit Wyoming early in the month, killing thousands of cattle and sheep trapped in fence-line snowdrifts. Record snowpacks are piled up in the high country, aided by late April storms: Parts of […]