Category Archives: History
High Marks for BP Oil Spill Documentary: “The Big Fix” Makes Top-10 List of Best Movies of 2011
Congratulations to co-directors (and Louisiana natives) Josh and Rebecca Tickell for the enormous and ongoing success of their oil spill documentary “The Big Fix.” The film – a masterful exposé of our nation’s worst environmental disaster – was just named one of the top 10 best “Hollywood South” films of 2011 by the Times-Picayune. The list, compiled by film critic Mike Scott, includes big-picture powerhouses like “Harry Potter and the [...]
Read More »Forget for a moment BP’s bogus promise to “make it right” on the Gulf, a new Wall Street Journal story documents just how far we have to go to “get it right” when it comes to offshore drilling. Ben Casselman reports in-depth about our nation’s drilling rig infrastructure, and it’s not comforting: “The deadly explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in April set off a fierce battle over deep-sea [...]
Read More »Not long after the explosion that resulted in one of the largest oil spills in history in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, the culprit, BP, committed public-relations gaffes, the most disturbingly memorable of which involved the company’s chief executive at the time, Tony Hayward, proclaiming, “I’d like my life back.” But postures of insensitivity have really been the least of BP’s offenses. As “The Spill,” a documentary that is [...]
Read More »We’re echoing an important story today about how some minority groups have been treated in the post-spill cleanup – and it’s not encouraging. According to the piece from ColorLines, people of color have been disturbingly under-represented in the response effort. You should take the time to read the report from Brentin Mock…the raw numbers are telling: For federal contracts, only 3.5 percent of dollars are going to small disadvantaged businesses. [...]
Read More »Keilen Williams had to leave his home in Pointe a la Hache, population of about 300, after Hurricane Katrina’s winds and storms devoured it. At the time, Williams, 34, was a shrimper in the small community of African-American fisher-folk who’ve worked and lived in this historically black region along the east bank of the Mississippi River for decades, and through many disasters. He’s since tried everything from setting up a [...]
Read More »WASHINGTON – The head of a White House-appointed panel examining the BP oil spill compared the federal government’s underestimate of the spill’s size to Gen. George Custer’s fatal lowballing the number of Indians at Little Big Horn. The two co-chairmen of the national oil spill commission on Monday said early government estimates caused the public to lose trust in what it was being told. The spill was about 60 times [...]
Read More »On a blistering June day in Houma, Louisiana, the local offices of BP — now the Deepwater Horizon Incident Command Center — were swarming with serious men and women in brightly colored vests. Top BP managers and their consultants wore white, the logistics team wore orange, federal and state environmental officials wore blue. Reporters wore purple vests so their handlers could keep track of them. On the walls of the [...]
Read More »We can finally stop saying we “have no idea” of the long-term health effects for cleanup workers involved in the BP spill response. A new study out of Spain, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, details findings from a 2002 spill off Spain’s northwest coast – and there are a host of disturbing concerns about the health impacts on cleanup workers. While noting differences – for example, the BP [...]
Read More »IN CORDOVA, ALASKA – He’d just met her, but Evan Beedle wanted Rosina Philippe to know how his life changed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, how pieces of his identity slipped away, one label at a time. Husband. Father. Fisherman. Philippe and about a dozen other Louisianans traveled more than 4,400 miles last month to talk to Alaskans like Beedle. They expected advice. Less anticipated was how often [...]
Read More »(CNN) – A blowout preventer that may hold important forensic evidence as to why it failed, triggering the world’s largest accidental oil spill, has been brought to the surface of the Gulf and placed on a vessel, officials said Saturday night. The device “was taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Justice as evidence in its ongoing investigation into the incident,” BP said. The blowout preventer was lifted to [...]
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