EPA wants Milltown Dam removed Dismantling the aging dam built at the point where the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers meet in western Montana will be the easy part. It's dealing with the contaminated mud behind the dam -- enough to fill a freight train more than 500 miles long -- that poses the real challenge, officials say. The Environmental Protection Agency wants the Milltown Dam, located at the end of the nation's largest Superfund environmental cleanup site, to be taken down around late 2006. "That's if Mother Nature cooperates and things go as planned," said EPA project manager Russ Forba. "It's an active system, so you can't always predict." After years of campaigning, environmentalists view the sediment removal as a triumph. Skeptics, however, say disturbing the mud could introduce new problems....
Permit requirements could put a hitch in farming operations “Neither Congress nor EPA ever intended to subject the application of pesticides to the Clean Water Act’s National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit requirements,” said Ed Duskin, Southern Crop Production Association executive vice president. “Rather, all sources of exposure in the environment — including air and water — from either direct application, runoff or spray drift of pesticides have been effectively regulated by EPA under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).” But rulings by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has “muddied the waters” on CWA permits, leading House members to introduce legislation (H.R. 1749), which would spell out that pesticides applied in accordance with FIFRA meet the Clean Water Act policy established by Congress....
$12.5 million deal OK'd to bar drilling in state waters of gulf A $12.5 million deal that won approval Wednesday from Gov. Jeb Bush and the Florida Cabinet is designed to protect state-controlled waters from oil drilling and end decades of litigation. "It sends a very positive and powerful signal that offshore drilling, particularly in the near waters of our state, is taboo," Bush said. "That chapter in Florida's history is over." Coastal Petroleum, the company that owns the last offshore drilling leases that the state issued in the 1940s, will receive the money in exchange for dropping efforts to drill along the state's west coast. Barring a course reversal by the Legislature, that means oil rigs will be indefinitely banned from Florida waters that extend about 10 miles into the Gulf of Mexico....

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