On Friday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that the Santa Susana Field Laboratory site is “a terrible environmental mess” but upheld a 2011 decision by U.S. District Judge John Walter that strict state cleanup regulations dictated by a 2007 law were trumped by looser federal standards.   read more

The Contra Costa Times reported last week that the two inspectors have not yet been hired, but when they are, they will be the only two inspectors checking out the bridges. They will be assisted in their task by the sole federal inspector assigned to the area―an area that includes 11 states. One of their first jobs will be to find the bridges. There is no comprehensive list.   read more

PUC Chairman Michael Peevey announced he would not participate in deciding the penalty it would assess Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) for its actions contributing to the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people and leveled a Bay Area neighborhood. Peevey’s chief aide, Carol Brown, resigned under fire for her participation in e-mail exchanges between the regulator and the utility that coordinated their actions and sealed their symbiotic relationship with expressions of love.   read more

It appears they are being kicked out of the subsidized medical insurance program because Covered California has determined their incomes are so low they belong in cheaper (and sometimes free) Medi-Cal. Insurance agent Evette Tsang, who reported that three clients with incomes above the Medi-Cal threshold were bumped, said, “My biggest problem is we don’t know what income standard they’re using.”   read more

The NRC was responding directly to safety issues raised by Michael Peck, its former senior inspector at Diablo Canyon who said the plant should be shut down until further studies are conducted. PG&E released a four-year study which, the utility said, “demonstrates Diablo Canyon continues to be seismically safe.”   read more

Three federal indictments laid out allegations that Mexican black market peso brokers sought out legitimate businesses in Mexico who would buy goods in Los Angeles. The L.A. wholesaler is paid in dollars by the Sinaloa Cartel and the importer pays the broker in pesos. The broker takes his cut and passes the rest to the cartel. Everybody is happy, except law enforcement and people who would rather not have cartels selling illegal drugs through a proficient black market in their country.   read more

Commissioner Michael Florio and Judges Melanie Darling and Kevin Dudney wrote that Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric would unfairly get most of any money recovered from Mitsubishi, the manufacturer of equipment that failed. The regulators want a fairer division of any insurance money that is collected down the road and a review of potential savings from refinancing San Onofre assets.   read more

The judge acknowledged that energy company Kinder Morgan and its regulator, the Bay Area Quality Management District (AQMD), did not inform the public in July 2013 when a permit was issued to expand an ethanol facility to accept crude oil, but said the law did not require them to be forthcoming. Nonetheless, that is when the clock started ticking on the six-month period to register an objection.   read more

The judge said releasing one week of data would jeopardize investigations and interfere with legitimate police work. It would reveal patrol patterns and hot-list comparisons to criminals, and also perhaps endanger third-parties. He weighed that against the public’s right to privacy and its inability to assess what the LAPD is doing with the data without access, and decided “a balancing of public interests works in favor of non-disclosure.”   read more

The site consists of two plumes of contaminated water at the base of the mountains, which have impacted more than 25% of the water supply for 175,000 San Bernardino residents. The EPA’s final cleanup plan circulated this month, indicates the agency will stay the course it has pursued since the contamination was discovered in the 1980s and expects to restore the aquifer to federal and state drinking water standards in 17 years, or perhaps a little later.   read more

The report said groundwater is not in danger of contamination when pressurized water, unknown chemicals, acid or other materials are injected deep into the Earth. Earthquakes, air pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, impacts on wildlife and vegetation—not a problem. Its assurances, taken by the BLM as sufficient cause to open the land up, did come with one large caveat: It didn’t have much current information.   read more

The U.S. Forest Service announced on Wednesday it had rejected environmentalist calls to let the 15,000 acres of ravaged terrain in question recover naturally and approved plans to log the area. Trees deemed a threat to the public will be cleared along another 17,706 square miles along roads. Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute, called her decision an “ecological travesty.”   read more

If a gun owner in California wants to buy a gun but is discouraged from doing so by having to wait 10 days for a background check to be completed, he has been denied his Second Amendment right to possess a weapon. At least that’s the interpretation of the Constitution by U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii. The lawsuit did not challenge the 10-day wait for first-time buyers.   read more

Times reporters wrote last week about an early peek they got at a school district internal draft report critical of the program that cited a lack of transparency during the bidding process. Among its complaints, the report said that project specifications were changed after much of the competition had been eliminated from the process. It also cited appearances of a conflict of interest between Deasy, his staff and vendors.   read more

It's been 146 years since a physician, Dr. J.D. Cooper, wrote an editorial in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin that laid out his vision for an alert system to give the city advanced warning of an approaching earthquake. California has pieces of a demonstration earthquake alert system in place that gave a 10-second alert to scientists at the University of California Berkeley Seismo Lab Sunday when a 6.0 shaker hit Napa, but was of no help to folks at the epicenter.   read more

Like the earlier settlements, only a portion is aimed at homeowner relief. No bankers are going to jail and a big chunk of the money will be treated as ordinary expenses for tax purposes. “These tax write-offs shift the burden back onto taxpayers and send the wrong message,” U.S. Public Interest Research Group analyst Phineas Baxandall told the Times.   read more