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At least 15 pilot whales have run aground in the Florida Keys. The below raw video from the Associated Press shows a whale struggling in what looks like a mangrove swamp and two more stuck in shallows. According to Ft Lauderdale/Miami local news for station WSVN-TV, a volunteer rescue effort is taking place to help the pilot whales with help from the US Navy.
Documents accessed under the Freedom of Information Act show BP attempting to influence independent research into the effects of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental activist group Greenpeace got a hold of incriminating emails and passed them on to the Guardian. Those concerns go far beyond academic interest into the impact of the spill. BP faces billions in fines and penalties, and possible criminal charges arising from the disaster. Its total liability will depend in part on a final account produced by scientists on how much oil entered the gulf from its blown-out well, and the…
Remember the US’s worst ecological disaster in history? You may have to try pretty hard as it was way back in the spring of 2010. Here are some of the latest developments in that sad, sordid, and shameful story: A presidential commission in the US is set to lay most of the blame for the disaster on BP, yet not enough to stop the energy giant’s stocks from recovering almost two thirds of their value after losing half in the wake of the disaster. The overall blame, however, is placed on “systematic failures” including BP, Halliburton, Transocean and US government…
A special report from France24 explores current conditions in the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. As BP is preparing to permanently seal the damaged well in the Gulf, the local community, environment and economy struggle to recover as oil and dispersant pollution continues to inflict damage. The France24 report explores BP’s ongoing influence in the Gulf of Mexico, including the legal and scientific communities there, the flow of information about conditions on the ground and in the water; and the oil giant’s shoddy, superficial cleanup efforts. Scientists in the Gulf States were…
Poor BP. After the Deepwater Horizon mishap they have been tarred by their own brush, so to speak. But lets face it, despite BP’s exceptionally bad safety record, it’s a bad brush all around; whether you’re a pelican in the Gulf of Mexico or a person living beside Alberta’s tar sands or in the Niger River Delta. Of course BP has the well-deserved worst rap at this point in time and so they won’t be able to share in the spoils of the next – and probably last – oil frontier: the pristine icy waters of the Arctic. The company…
Though around half of the oil spilt into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April remains unaccounted for, scientists have mapped out a 22-mile (35 km) underwater plume of petrochemicals. The fact that so much oil has remained underwater instead of floating to the surface is surprising to scientists and also problematic because it makes the oil more difficult to locate. This means that they don’t know what damage may still be occurring in the Gulf and where. Other unknowns include why the oil didn’t disperse as expected and the unpredictable – and undependable – nature…
BP has agreed to pay $50.6m (€39.7m) in fines to US government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for failing to rectify safety hazards after a 2005 explosion at a Texas City oil refinery killed 15 workers and injured 170. BP already paid a $21.3m (€16.7m) record breaking fine to OSHA following the deadly 2005 explosion. Besides both fines BP has agreed to set aside $500m to correct safety conditions at the refinery for current workers. From an RTT News report: The settlement resolves 270 of 709 citations OSHA issued at the Texas refinery in October 2009, BP said in…
As estimates of the oil spilling from the busted well in the Gulf of Mexico shot up like a post-Perestroika stock market on an almost daily basis, so plummeted the credibility of BP and the US government’s estimates regarding the volume of leaking oil. Accuracy apparently is not their strong suit. Won’t get fooled again. Or will we? What choice do we have without our own personal oil spill experts replete with super submarines? Even James Cameron wasn’t allowed to look – and he made Avatar, Aliens and Terminator. Surely that’s gotta open some doors? None of this means the…
Yesterday and today BP crews are attempting to securely seal the leak on the blown out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico by pumping in cement. Operation ‘static kill’ has so far been successful in halting the flow of oil into the Gulf, which began on April 20th with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. The latest effort began with BP crews pumping in special mud to stop the leak and will hopefully conclude – after the cement on top has dried – with the drilling of two relief wells. The Obama administration recently announced that around…
Despite low public opinion on deep sea drilling and an overall global shift away from the practice, including the Obama administration’s moratorium in the US, the UK government – the ‘greenest government eva’ – has decided to go against the grain and allow exploratory drilling in the North Sea. A spokeswoman for the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change was quoted in an article in the Independent: We will not consent to the drilling of any well unless we are convinced that it is designed to the very highest standards, that the equipment used is fully tested and that…
BP has successfully stopped the oil flowing out of the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico by filling the well with a special kind of mud. It could be necessary to pump more mud into the well and workers may seal the top with concrete to assist in the proposed lasting solution of the two relief wells currently being drilled. From a BBC News report: The US government says the well leaked 4.9 million barrels of oil before being capped last month, with only 800,000 barrels being captured. The US government is expected to announce today that the remaining…
Yesterday the United States experienced two more oil spills: One in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. A tug boat, which was pushing a barge, ran into an abandoned well in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday morning, causing gas and oil to spew 100ft (30m) into the air. The well is located in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, some 65 miles (105km) south of New Orleans. Barataria Bay is an ecologically rich wetlands and fishing area that has been unused since the Deepwater Horizon spill began on April 10th. This is at least the third…
Though the cap on the damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is reportedly holding, hydrocarbon leakage has been detected on the seabed. The hope has been that the cap – successfully placed over the wellhead last week – would stop the flow of oil into the Gulf until permanent relief wells are in place. US Admiral Thad Allen has written to BP chief of operations Bob Dudley demanding answers. He is quoted in a report in the Guardian: I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging…
As the world’s attention is still focused on the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster the EU’s energy commissioner, Gunther Oettinger, is calling for a moratorium on deep water oil drilling in Europe. The energy commissioner met with oil industry representatives on Wednesday and clearly stated that he is in favor of banning deep sea oil drilling and instituting a freeze on issuing new drilling permits. This would mostly affect drilling in around the UK. From a BBC News report: Mr Oettinger wants the Union’s member states to call a halt to drilling around Europe, including the Mediterranean and Black Sea,…
Check out this clip from last night’s Rachel Maddow show on the situation in the Gulf of Mexico in light of BP’s successful capping of the oil well leak. Rachel is joined by NBC’s chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson to discuss possible scenarios such as hurricanes and contingency plans as well as the eventual relief well, which should offer a permanent solution to the leak in the Gulf. What next for the Gulf? Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Keep up to date on the situation in the Gulf via this Associated Press…
You thought it might never happen, but yesterday evening BP successfully stopped the flow of oil from the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico. The cap is a temporary fix – with the lasting solution being the drilling of a relief well scheduled to take place in a few weeks time. Both US President Barack Obama and BP’s chief expressed cautious optimism at the news that the oil leak in the Gulf was under control for the first time in 87 days. From a report in the Guardian: Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said engineers would be checking…
In 2000 a massive oil leak from an underwater Petrobras pipeline spilled into Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is considered one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters ever and was given an estimated recovery time of 10 years. What Al Jazeera English reporter Gabriel Elizondo discovered on a recent trip to Guanabara Bay is that it has anything but recovered during the past 10 years: The mud is thick, black and lifeless. And it stinks. Dead stumps – what used to be thick green mangrove swamps – protrude out from the mud as far as your eyes see….
Does deep sea oil drilling amongst Greenland’s icebergs sound a bit dicey to you? Probably any deep sea drilling does these days, what with the ongoing and unprecedented disaster in the Gulf of Mexico still dominating much of the news. So it’s no wonder that Greenpeace and the WWF are concerned about recent developments in the Arctic Ocean, where British oil exploration and extraction firm Cairn Energy has recently begun drilling in waters up to 500 meters deep. From an article in the Guardian: We think it is completely irresponsible for Cairn to proceed with these operations when the US,…
Just soon as the US sent a hot Russian spy back home, an offer to help stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico emerged from the former ‘Evil Empire’. Russian submarine captain Yevgenii Chernyaev has told the BBC that two unique submersibles from Russia, which are capable of diving 6,000 meters deep, would be able to cap the leak. The subs are currently exploring for gas hydrates in Lake Baikal – the deepest lake in the world – in eastern Siberia. Anatoly Sagalevich of Russia’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, which owns the vessels, said that he had an…
An Associated Press investigation has uncovered the shocking fact that over 27,000 abandoned oil wells lie insufficiently guarded or unmonitored in the Gulf of Mexico. 600 of them are BP wells. The oldest of these oil wells was abandoned in the late 1940s and 3,500 of the wells are officially categorized as ‘temporarily abandoned’, raising questions about whether they are properly sealed. From an AP report: Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more…
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