Sometimes random headlines in the news aren’t as random as you think. Consider these three seemingly unrelated stories, all from Pennsylvania.

The first is the news that everyone around these parts is talking about this week: the roughly 8,100-gallon spill of hazardous chemicals at a plant in lower Bucks County that entered the Delaware River, threatens to enter a main water plant for Philadelphia, and has caused a massive run on bottled water across the region.

Also this weekend, across the state: Officials at Shell’s brand new $6 billion plastics plant on the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh warned residents that maintenance problems would cause another round of elevated flaring — the latest in a string of incidents since the facility’s November opening that have turned the night sky orange while exceeding the expected yearly limit for air pollution in little more than a month.

Meanwhile, nearby in East Palestine, Ohio, the fallout from February’s toxic train wreck of chemical cars on the Norfolk Southern line continued last week as Pennsylvania’s Blackhawk School District, roughly 15 miles away, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that its schoolchildren were endangered after “toxic fires and deadly plumes dumped a lethal cocktail on its buildings, property soil, and water supplies where deposits of the toxic materials have been found.