Stevenson Swanson

Drink any glass of tap water and you may gulp them down: cigar-shaped creatures five-thousandths of a millimeter long with a fuzzy pelt of flagella. They're called Legionella bacteria, and...

Amoco's Whiting refinery turns 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day into gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil and other petroleum products. It is big. In fact, it is the third-largest...

At a recent hearing about a Lynwood composting site, Janice Zandstra produced her "odor log," a sheaf of papers documenting the days over the last three years when the stench...

The Chicago Flood was a lemon out of which the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District sought to make lemonade. Within hours of the first reports that Loop basements were filling with...

George Stern lives in Illinois, but he makes a good living by hauling New York`s garbage. ''It`s a great business,'' said Stern, president of the Chicago & Illinois Midland Railway,...

Vehicle-emissions tests in the Chicago area will take longer and cost the state twice as much as they do now because of new federal rules designed to fight urban air...

A violent storm descended on the metropolitan area Thursday, killing one person, injuring several dozen, and leaving behind toppled walls, roofless houses, overturned sailboats, uprooted trees, and plenty of jangled...

Limiting the use of ethanol in gasoline would cripple the Midwestern-based ethanol industry, politicians and representatives of the ethanol industry asserted Tuesday. Gov. Jim Edgar said at a news conference...

The trenches that run across Orestes Garcia`s gas station mark the front lines in the Chicago area`s fight against its severe ozone problem. They were dug last week as part...

No true boater needs another excuse to spend more time out on the water, but here`s one anyway: The more you use your boat, the less likely you are to...