oil spill
jjacquet | September 1, 2010History repeats itself. Boy does it.
This was never more evident than after I finished reading Charles Wohlforth's The Fate of Nature (2010), which has a few ominous chapters dedicated to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Wohlforth was a journalist who covered the spill in the field and after reading his account, I was humbled by the realization that none of my observations of the BP oil spill were orignal. The landscape is almost exactly the same, except for the fact that BP is going to wind up paying less money for a bigger disaster and that photoshop didn't exist yet, so Exxon couldn't…
egrossman | August 23, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
On August 17th the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) held the first public discussion of plans for its Gulf Worker Study - also called the Gulf Long Term Follow-up Study - designed to assess short and long-term health effects associated with BP/Deepwater Horizon oil disaster clean-up work. "Since the spill," said NIEHS director Linda Birnbaum opening the meeting, "NIEHS has assisted with safety training for more than 100,000 workers with courses taught in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. But now it's time to turn our attention to the potential…
sb admin | August 11, 2010Let's briefly compare the Exxon and BP spills.
Exxon oil estimated to have spilled into Prince William Sound: 11 million gallons
BP oil estimated to have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico: 172 million gallons
So when we talk about how BP's Oil Spill Bill Could Dwarf Exxon's Valdez Tab we should remember that BP's oil spill also dwarfed Exxon's. And is the assertion that the tab is bigger even true? Well, in nominal and real terms, yes.
Cost of the Exxon clean up: $2 billion (1989 dollars) or $3.58 billion (2010 dollars)*
Cost of the BP clean up: $6.1 billion (2010 dollars)
But if we…
jjacquet | August 11, 2010Let's briefly compare the Exxon and BP spills.
Exxon oil estimated to have spilled into Prince William Sound: 11 million gallons
BP oil estimated to have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico: 172 million gallons
So when we talk about how BP's Oil Spill Bill Could Dwarf Exxon's Valdez Tab we should remember that BP's oil spill also dwarfed Exxon's. And is the assertion that the tab is bigger even true? Well, in nominal and real terms, yes.
Cost of the Exxon clean up: $2 billion (1989 dollars) or $3.58 billion (2010 dollars)*
Cost of the BP clean up: $6.1 billion (2010 dollars)
But if we…
sb admin | August 9, 2010Read an interview I did with Mongabay about the Gulf Oil spill more than a week ago (apologies for the lag time). Also watch for a comparison of the Exxon Valdez and Gulf oil spills coming soon...
jjacquet | August 9, 2010Read an interview I did with Mongabay about the Gulf Oil spill more than a week ago (apologies for the lag time). Also watch for a comparison of the Exxon Valdez and Gulf oil spills coming soon...
lborkowski | August 3, 2010BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and may soon be "killed" for good, but fixing the widespread damage from the disaster will take years. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has has released a report (supported by the Children's Health Fund) based on a survey of 1,200 residents of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi. Their findings give a sense of how widespread the spill's impacts are on physical, mental, and financial health:
Over one-third of parents reported that their children had experienced either physical…
stoat | August 3, 2010
Quark Soup has a post comparing the spill to Niagara; and notes that the spill would be a cube ~93m on a side.
Checkling the share price (still hovering around 4.10, so neither good news nor bad) I see BP are starting to ask others to pay up for their shares. It will be interesting to see how that goes - through the courts, or quiet settlements?
Misc people complained at me when I previously said Incidentally, misc people have called this spill "unprecendented". That seems dubious (except in the traditional sense that 11 dead in Cumbria is headline news for days; 11 misc folks dead in road…
lborkowski | July 30, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Alice Shabecoff
As the massive oil slicks from the BP disaster continue to advance upon shores and communities, worries over the effects on wildlife and the natural environment abound, and rightfully so: hailed as the biggest oil spill in our nation's history, much of the damage is irreparable, with more inevitably to come. Yet policy makers, community members and advocates are strangely silent about another unavoidable danger: substantial harm to the children of the coast…
jjacquet | July 28, 2010In a humble effort at citizen journalism, we went around New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf asking people what they thought of the BP oil spill. Most of victims don't have voices, but here is what a few of the humans thought (they wrote down their opinions or, on occasion, dictated it to us). For the collection, see the Flickr set. If you would like to add your photo and thought to the fray, please email me at guiltyplanet at gmail dot com.
Josiah & Kejeaun, Jennings, LA
Don Houghton, New Orleans, LA
Joshua Carter, Clayton, TX
John Smith, New Orleans, LA
Zack Vincent, Brent…
egrossman | July 26, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
In mid-June most of the seafood shacks along the bayou roads between New Orleans and Grand Isle were closed. A seafood market that I stopped by on the western edge of New Orleans was virtually devoid of customers despite bins brimming with bright blue crab and tawny shrimp. Business was so slim that two women who should have been tending to customers were playing Yahtzee. "We've never done this on a workday before," they told me. Another woman unloading sacks of shrimp frowned at my notepad and said, "I blame the media. We've got plenty of shrimp and it's safe." She…
lborkowski | July 20, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
"I want this seafood to be safe. But I want those workers to be as safe as those shrimp and I'm not just going for funny one-liner," said Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) at the conclusion of the July 15th Senate Appropriations Committee's Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies subcommittee hearing on the use of chemical oil dispersants in the Gulf.
"One might say, 'Well, what's Commerce-Justice doing with public health?'" Mikulski asked rhetorically. "Well, we think [about] water quality, the impact on marine life and seafood and what these dispersants mean to…
jjacquet | July 20, 2010BP says oil flow has stopped as cap is tested, although we're not sure when there will be a permanent solution. But even if they manage to stop the oil, can BP stop the hate?
Many people are certainly angry at BP. The Facebook Boycott BP page had 350,000 followers in early June and is now up to 825,000 people. BPGlobalPR, an adbusting on Twitter, has more than 186,000 followers. In New Orleans, there were many anti-BP t-shirts. British people we met in New Orleans were hiding their accent. William Wilson from Lincoln, England said this:
Soon after the spill, BP began strategizing…
jjacquet | July 15, 2010In the French Quarter of NOLA, shirts about the spill are a hot item. Here are a few favorites around town. For more, check out our Flickr set devoted to oil spill t-shirts.
lborkowski | July 15, 2010Kyle Hopkins of McClatchy follows up on the question of how we learned from the Exxon Valdez disaster about long-term health effects experienced by cleanup workers. In short, we have no peer-reviewed studies on this important topic, even though occupational health experts called for long-term monitoring of workers. Hopkins writes:
Exxon has consistently maintained that there's no evidence spill workers experienced any adverse health effects as a result of the cleanup. Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said she isn't aware of any long-term study the company conducted on its own.
"The challenge is…
jjacquet | July 13, 2010"The bucketheads are here," Jeff Holmes radioed back to his camp in Grand Bayou Village, a totally bizarre and charming outcropping of homes built on salt marshes that Holmes is worried will disintegrate under a thin but suffocating blanket of oil that is creeping up the bayou. That is, in part, why he has volunteered to take us out to film the bay as part of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade's Grassroots Mapping Project, which is helping citizens use balloons, kites, and other simple and inexpensive tools to produce their own aerial imagery of the spill (which is then pieced together by GIS…
sastyk | July 13, 2010In the previous thread commenters DC Sessions and Prometheus have been discussing the pure aesthetic appreciation of the BP disaster and other man made problems with splendor that is grim. And what they say is true -and I think interesting and worth looking at. After all, all of us are just a teensie weensy wee bit bloodthirsty, right?
For me, however, what came of the discussion was the irresistable urge to play "Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, which seems on target. So I leave you with it (the Tit Willow bit at the beginning is also delightful,…
sastyk | July 12, 2010If a whole nation can have its fingers crossed, I suspect it does right now. But what happens if it (and the other containment efforts) don't work? I don't think this is fear mongering,after 3 months of oil blowing into the Gulf. We have to ask the question.
Greg Laden has an answer, by way of University of Hawaii - and perhaps unsurprisingly it isn't pretty.
Sharon
vlicata | July 11, 2010BP has released the first slug of oil-spill hush money to LSU: $2 million for research on the Effects of the Oil Spill and it's Cleanup. Sounds like a lot of research money, until you realize that LSU does about $200 million dollars of research a year. So, it's kind of like if your next door neighbor (the one who knocked down his house and opened a strip mine) came over to your house and crapped in your refrigerator on $200 worth of groceries you just bought, then gave you two dollars so you could look into what effect his actions had on your food (and so you would feel good about him again…
sb admin | July 10, 2010Tonight we made our way to Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter to witness the New Orleans gathering of Worldwide Protest BP Day. The drizzling weather probably served to separate the men from the boys, as they say, and so good intentions and half-baked messages ran high (see photos from the protest on Fickr).
There were plenty of people opposed to the use of Corexit and one woman rightfully demanded to know why it was banned in Europe but still legal in the U.S. (read more about this issue on the ProPublica blog). There were accusations that the President was doing nothing and that…