Both advocates and the Environmental Protection Agency have raised environmental justice concerns about the plant's location.

The penalty is part of a settlement Metalworking Lubricants Company reached with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management late last week.

This means children, seniors, and anyone with a heart or lung condition should avoid strenuous work or outside exercise.

The explosion Sunday in a raw materials section of the sprawling Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor West mill on the Lake Michigan shoreline “was caused by rainwater meeting the hot slag.”

PFAS are human-made chemicals found in everything from carpets, to fast food wrappers, to firefighting foams on military bases -- like Grissom Air Reserve Base near Kokomo.

Kokomo officials recently submitted their proposed cleanup plan to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management spelling out how they will address the toxic soils found on land at the city's wastewater treatment plant.

So far, the state has detected little or no toxic PFAS chemicals in Indiana's smaller drinking water utilities. That’s according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s preliminary testing data from 24 smaller water utilities.

Environmental regulators around the country monitored industrial air polluters a bit less than usual last fiscal year because of the pandemic. But for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, that monitoring dropped by 28 percent.

The Gary Common Council recently voted to approve an industrial plant that converts trash into jet fuel. If built, it would be the largest such facility in the country.

The agency's chief of staff, Brian Rockensuess, will replace Bruno Piggott who left for a job with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water.