New Free Service Provides Local Environmental Alerts

We were just speaking of how invaluable local blogs are and here's a great example. From Susan Read and the Westchester-Grand Prairie Community Alliance comes word of an invaluable service that allows you to track reported events like spills, accidents, and investigations in your area.

"Skytruth" is a free subscribtion service that promises to "delivers real-time updates about environmental incidents in your back yard (or whatever part of the world you know and love)."

The SkyTruth alert system is a free service open to the public that provides daily updates of environmentally significant incidents by geographical area. You can browse the most recent incident reports on a map or in Google Earth, and you can also subscribe to a personalized feed of incident reports via RSS or email

The alert feed currently contains reports generated from ongoing SkyTruth investigations, combined with selected reports from the the National Response Center that have been processed by SkyTruth's automated expert system to clean up problem data and add additional SkyTruth commentary and analysis.

No word on who or what is funding it, or on any Board of Directors or staff. But the infomation feeds are legit and timely. You pick the area you want Skytruth to monitor by zooming in and out on a Google map until you pick the boundaries and clicking. It's pretty darn easy. Check it out.