Angela Johnston

The redevelopment of the Hunters Point Shipyard is slated to be San Francisco’s biggest redevelopment project since the 1906 earthquake.

The Shipyard is a former naval base and nuclear-weapons testing lab — and the cleanup of radioactive materials used there has been ongoing for decades.

This is the first story in our four-part series “Persistent Poison: Lead’s Toxic Legacy in the Bay Area”   

A 2017 Reuters report showed that a few Bay Area neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning in the country.

This is the second story in our four-part series  “Persistent Poison: Lead’s Toxic Legacy in the Bay Area,” an in-depth look at childhood lead poisoning in the Bay Area.

This is the third story in our four-part series  “Persistent Poison: Lead’s Toxic Legacy in the Bay Area,” an in-depth look at childhood lead poisoning in the Bay Area.

The numbers show the lead poisoning problem in the Bay Area is bad — but is what we know just the tip of the iceberg?

This is the last story in our four-part series “Persistent Poison: Lead’s Toxic Legacy in the Bay Area.”  

In Alameda County, which has some of the highest lead levels in the country, an energetic public health nurse helps families after their child has been lead poisoned. But her work is a stopgap solution. What’s the answer to preventing leading poisoning before it starts?

This is part of our series  “Persistent Poison: Lead’s Toxic Legacy in the Bay Area,” an in-depth look at childhood lead poisoning in the region.

This month we’ve experienced record-breaking weather across the state.

In hundreds of communities across the state, the water coming out of the tap is still not drinkable. Many of these places are small, rural, and economically disadvantaged — the bulk of them are located in the Central Valley. But the Bay Area isn’t immune, and the solutions aren’t easy.

A long legal battle over shipping coal out of the new Oakland export terminal is headed to trial.

Ben Durkee is a true Trinity local. He’s lived and worked in the Northern California county his entire life.  

The devastating October 2017 wildfires in Northern California were the worst in the state’s history, and fire scientists expect more of these extreme blazes to become the norm. Millions of dead trees turn forests into tinderboxes. And many of those trees were killed by one tiny culprit — the bark beetle.

Governor Brown’s plan to build tunnels under the Delta suffered another setback when the Santa Clara Valley Water district decided it would only fund the project if it is scaled back.

From switching to renewable energy to battery storage, to taxing drinking water. Out of the hundreds of bills that the California Assembly debated in the final hours of the legislative session this month, many dealt with water, climate change, and the environment. KALW's energy and environment reporter Angela Johnston shares some of the key environmental legislation now sitting on Governor Brown’s desk, and the ones that didn’t make it there.

Three years ago a major earthquake rattled the Bay Area. Napa Valley was hit the hardest: 200 people were injured, one person died and the total financial damage in the area was almost a billion dollars. It was also the first time an experimental early warning system called Shake Alert notified researchers of a major quake before it actually happened. If researchers secure enough funding, we may have more time to duck, cover and hold on before the next big one.

Two California counties and one city did something unprecedented last week: San Mateo County, Marin County, and Imperial Beach down in San Diego are suing 37 different oil and gas companies for the projected effects and costs of sea level rise along the coast.

If you drive east on the Bay Bridge out of San Francisco and look down at Treasure Island, it’s hard to miss what look like enormous piles of dirt. These mounds are actually the remains of old Navy barracks, ground into pieces.

Almost everyone who flies into San Francisco or San Jose airport has seen it -- a vibrant patchwork quilt of colorful water. There, on the southern edge of the San Francisco Bay, you can see bright pinks, pumpkin oranges, neon greens and deep magentas, contrasted against the dark blues of the natural bay water. The last time KALW listener Donna Staton peered out an airplane window, she saw it, too.

The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the hardest-hit agencies in President Trump's preliminary budget. The blueprint slashes the EPA's budget by nearly one third.

Almost nothing goes to waste at Bob Giacomini’s family dairy farm north of Point Reyes Station.

If you stand on the edge of the Almaden Dam in San Jose right now, you can feel the ground violently shaking and vibrating beneath your feet. It’s the result of thousands of cubic feet of water rushing out of the reservoir, down into a creek, flowing into the bay. The water’s being released to keep the reservoir from overflowing.

California’s high-speed rail system is the biggest infrastructure project in the state. This documentary is a deep dive into the project. We check in on what’s happening right now, what challenges the project faces, and who will be impacted by it.

This is Part 2 of a four-part series about high-speed rail in California. Part 1: First Stop, Fresno. Part 2: Corn nuts and the bullet train. Part 3: Will the train be affordable?. Part 4: San Jose to San Francisco — easier said than done. Listen to the whole show: Inside High-Speed Rail.   

Kole Upton’s family has been farming in the Central Valley since 1946.

This is Part 1 of a four-part series about high-speed rail in California. Part 1: First Stop, Fresno. Part 2: Corn nuts and the bullet train. Part 3: Will the train be affordable?. Part 4: San Jose to San Francisco — easier said than done. Listen to the whole show: Inside High-Speed Rail.   

California’s high-speed rail system is the biggest infrastructure project in the state. In 2008, voters approved funding for the bullet train that would get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours. 

This is Part of 3 a four-part series about high-speed rail in California. Part 1: First Stop, Fresno. Part 2: Corn nuts and the bullet train. Part 3: Will the train be affordable?. Part 4: San Jose to San Francisco — easier said than done. Listen to the whole show: Inside High-Speed Rail.   

High-speed rail construction is happening right now in the Central Valley, even though the project doesn’t have all the money it needs.

This week promises lots of rain for the Bay Area — but too much of a good thing can sometimes turn bad. Erosion, mudslides and flooding are a danger.

Austin Newsom is an Amtrak ticket agent at the Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco. On his lunch breaks, he takes walks along the Embarcadero.

“It’s really nice, and people usually, when they’re walking along the waterfront, for whatever reason they have big smiles on their faces. I think it makes people happy.”

Prop 55 has to do with income tax. Specifically, income tax for people who make a lot of money. Four years ago we passed a tax rate increase for people making more than 250,000 dollars a year. That extra money — about 7 billion dollars — has gone to education and health care. The increase is set to expire in 2018--but not if a majority of Californians vote yes on Prop 55.

Last month, four Bay Area residents were named Macarthur Award winners. That means they’re now unofficialy known as "geniuses". Each will receive more than $600,000, and can do with it what they will. That’s usually for the public good. So we all win.

This measure is all about revenue bonds. Bonds are the state’s way of borrowing money for projects that are too big to pay for all at once: big construction projects like dams, highways or bridges. Right now, the state doesn’t need voter approval to sell revenue bonds; they can just sell them to investors, regardless of the amount.