Laura Cassels/Florida Trident

Lee County Commissioner David Mulicka, owner of Honc Destruction, is responsible for the dumping at Gator Road near Firing’s house in Briarcliff. Last year, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection ordered Mulicka and the property owner to clean up the toxic mess after inspectors found hazardous materials there, according to state records. Mulicka and the property owner entered into a consent order with the DEP in September requiring them to remove the hazardous materials and other illegal waste, to measure the contamination it caused, and to pay a $41,000 penalty. The 239-acre site, where 179 acres are polluted, is not permitted as a waste-disposal facility.

With Florida’s measles outbreak making headlines, the Sunshine State is preparing to welcome millions of college students and families to its beaches, amusement parks and other hotspots for spring break throughout March and April. Doctors worry those visitors may return home with more than tans.

Should local governments in Florida be free to pursue local net-zero goals that fight climate change, sea-level rise, extreme heat and worsening weather plaguing their residents? Republicans in the state Legislature are saying no.

Hoping to position Florida as the next big destination for large and hyperscale data centers that power artificial intelligence, state lawmakers are weighing how much corporate secrecy is enough but not too much and how to manage the centers’ intensive demands for energy and water where they operate. Sen. Bryan Avila, Miami-Dade Republican, is leading the charge, saying Florida can outcompete motivated states such as Georgia, Virginia and Texas to land the multibillion-dollar projects here, creating thousands of high-tech jobs, tax revenue and related economic development.

State lawmakers are weighing a ban on a highly effective but toxic foam widely used to suppress flammable-liquid fires that is leaking into water supplies and sickening people, with firefighters at the forefront of the worldwide battle with “forever chemicals.”

Tallahassee pediatrician D. Paul Robinson was a medical resident while researchers were working in the 1980s to finalize a vaccine against a bacterial scourge that infected and maimed 1 in every 200 young children in the United States, most of them no older than 2. In his pediatric training, he was required to help diagnose the scourge – called Haemophilus influenzae Type b, or Hib — by performing spinal taps on severely ill babies and young children, one after another.

Wasting no time to start on his pledge last week to remove all vaccine mandates in Florida, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo quickly removed four of them from school immunization requirements starting as soon as December. He can remove only those four unilaterally but pledged to push lawmakers to abolish “every last one of them.”The four vaccines soon to be stripped from those required for public and private school attendance fight Hepatitis B, Varicella (chickenpox), Haemophilus influenza type b (Hib), and a fourth one that fights Pneumococcal bacteria that causes pneumonia, meningitis and other bacterial infections, a Florida Department of Health representative confirmed on Sunday. All of those vaccines are recommended for school-age children by state and federal health authorities and medical associations.

A suspended federal project that promised to be a game-changer in protecting the public from worsening flooding is back in business today, with a team of scientists hard at work to make up for lost time.

A cadre of engineers and planners who design America’s roads, bridges, hospitals and other critical infrastructure fear that an emerging tool that would replace the nation’s out-of-date rainfall and flood data is on the Trump Administration chopping block.The new tool, Atlas 15, uses modernized rainfall data to allow engineers to design and build infrastructure to withstand flooding for decades to come as extreme rainfall predictably worsens.Without it, the engineers and planners say, they would be forced to rely on old data that understate flood risks and put infrastructure in harm’s way.