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Fort Smith Tank Rupture: When Federal Response Ends, the Insurance Story Begins
May 11th, 2026
The Incident at a GlanceC&S Chemicals, Inc., headquartered in Roswell, Georgia, is a manufacturer of water treatment chemicals. Its product line includes aluminum sulfate, sodium aluminate, sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide, sold to municipal drinking water utilities, wastewater plants, and paper mills across the Southeast and Midwest. The company was acquired by private equity firm ChemCentric in a leveraged buyout in May 2025, a transaction detail that matters for the coverage discussion below. The Fort Smith facility sits near the 7000 block of U.S. Highway 271, just inside the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. Key facts from the May 2 incident and the week that followed: Trigger: Failure of a bulk storage tank holding acidified aluminum sulfate. The initial report described an explosion; the EPA later confirmed the tank ruptured from "unknown...
Washington Designated Microplastics a Federal Priority Contaminant. Third-Party Suits Won't Wait for the Rule to Follow.
April 8th, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C., On April 2, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services announced that microplastics and pharmaceuticals would be added to the EPA's Contaminant Candidate List under the Safe Drinking Water Act, marking the first time in the program's history that either category has appeared on the list....
Forever Chemicals Are in Missouri’s Tap Water. The Cleanup Bill Could Top $48 Billion — and Nobody Knows Who Pays.
March 30th, 2026
JEFFERSON CITY, MO — Newly released federal testing data confirm that at least six Missouri water systems are delivering tap water with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) concentrations above the legal limit — and that the reckoning for decades...
West Virginia Chemical Plant Incident: The Insurance Exposure Behind the Headlines
April 30th, 2026
The Incident at a GlanceCatalyst Refiners is a chemical manufacturing subsidiary of Ames Goldsmith Corp., a precious metals manufacturer headquartered in New York. The Institute facility operates in what is historically known as West Virginia's "chemical valley," a stretch of the Kanawha River corridor with a long legacy of industrial chemical manufacturing....
The Spill That Won’t End: One Michigan Crash Dumped 26,000 Pounds of Plastic Into a River Within a Superfund Cleanup Site — and the Cleanup Bill Is Still Growing
March 26th, 2026
ALLEGAN COUNTY, MI — On the morning of January 27, 2026, a Quest Liner semi-trailer hauling 26,000 pounds of plastic pellets lost control on icy northbound Interstate 196 at exit...
When the Rules Go Away, the Liability Doesn't: EPA's Coal Ash Rollback and the Exposure Left Behind
April 15th, 2026
On April 9, 2026, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed sweeping amendments to the federal Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) regulations, the rules that govern how coal ash is stored, monitored, and cleaned up at power plant sites across the...