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ups in a Southern California wildfire that chased thousands of people from their homes.
• Unless the state gets significant rainfall in the next two months, television sets glowing with wildfires could play like reruns throughout the year.
• Reservoir levels in the north and central parts of the state were more depleted than in Southern California, but Brown still asked Los Angeles to do its part to conserve -- and gave a nod to the politics of water in the vast state.
• "The drought accentuates and further displays the conflicts between north and south and between urban and rural parts of the state. So, as governor, I'll be doing my part to bring people together and working through this."
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The chemical spill that contaminated water for hundreds of thousands of West Virginians was just the latest and most high-profile case of coal sullying the nation's waters.
• For decades, chemicals and waste from the coal industry have tainted hundreds of waterways and groundwater supplies, spoiling private wells, shutting down fishing and rendering streams virtually lifeless, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal environmental data. But because these contaminants are released gradually and in some cases not tracked or regulated, they attract much less attention than a massive spill like the one in West Virginia.
• "I've made a career of body counts of dead fish and wildlife made that way from coal," said Dennis Lemly, a U.S. Forest Service research biologist who has spent decades chronicling the deformities pollution from coal mining has caused in fish. "How many years and how many cases does it take before somebody will step up to the plate and say, 'Wait a minute, we need to change this'?"
• The spill of a coal-cleaning chemical into a river in Charleston, W.Va., that left 300,000 people without water exposes a potentially new and under-regulated risk to water from the coal industry, at a time when the federal government is still trying to close regulatory gaps that have contributed to coal's long legacy of water pollution.
• From its mining to the waste created when it is burned for electricity, pollutants associated with coal have contaminated waterways, wells and lakes with far more insidious and longer-lasting contaminants than the chemical that spilled out of a tank farm on the banks of the Elk River.

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