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Articles in the New York Times that include Toxics Targeting.

Toxic Tidbits, via the Web

HAVE you ever wondered about health hazards lurking underground near your home, your workplace or a property that you are thinking of buying or renting?

For locations in New York State, there is now an easy way to find out, without resorting to costly testing of groundwater and soil core samples. A free Web site enables anyone — including prospective buyers and sellers, brokers and neighbors — to check a location by typing in its address.

What Seeps Beneath

PAUL GRANGER, the superintendent of the Plainview Water District, had to shout over the sound of a 150-horsepower pump as it sucked 995 gallons of water a minute up from a layer of sandy soil 400 feet underground.

"A lot of people don't realize that their water comes out of the ground right underneath them," Mr. Granger said, standing inside the small brick building that houses the pump on the front lawn of the district's headquarters on Manetto Hill Road. That underground water supply, or aquifer, supplies the drinking water for nearly three million people living on Long Island.

G.E. Spent Years Cleaning Up the Hudson. Was It Enough?

Suffolk Plant: Big Mess or Minor Problem?

Tucked away in the woods off a winding side road here, the Lawrence Aviation Industries plant has kept a very low profile since it was established in the 1950's. All that most locals ever saw of the place was the gate and guardhouse just beyond a private railroad crossing along Sheep Pasture Road.

And no wonder: Lawrence Aviation made titanium parts for advanced military aircraft like the Grumman F-14 fighter jet.

Environmental officials say that it also made a terrible mess.

Gas Drilling Is Called Safe in New York

ALBANY — The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from an expert who did not believe it should be kept secret.

State Checking Dozens of Sites for Hidden Contaminants



WITH satellite photographs all over the Internet, images of Long Island as seen from above are only a few mouse clicks away. Views beneath the Island's surface and a clear picture of what may be seeping up and down are not so easy to come by.

The need for a better view of what is going on below ground has assumed new urgency in New York as environmental officials move to evaluate the threat of volatile chemical vapors rising into homes and businesses from contaminated soil and water — some at sites the state said had already been cleaned up.

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