Category Archives: Recovery
As I’ve noted several times recently, the tide has changed when it comes to public perceptions of the Gulf of Mexico, more than three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a while, the mega-millions that BP had spent on slick marketing, and bland pronouncements from public officials, had lulled not only the public but even journalists to sleep. But now, good science and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting has changed [...]
Read More »Like most people, I try to stay optimistic in life, but I have to say that the latest flurry of news out of the Gulf region — which coincided with the three-year anniversary of BP’s massive oil spill — has been discouraging. Every day for the last week or two, it seems, my contacts in the environmental community send me a new news report, or a scientific study, bearing bad [...]
Read More »I have to confess: I’m a little surprised — and gratified — at the extent to which mainstream media outlets have suddenly become focused on the lingering and sometimes catastrophic effects of both BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill and the botched cover-up-disguised-as-cleanup using the toxic chemical Corexit. BP has spent tens of millions of dollars of its gargantuan profits on a PR campaign to spin the American people that everything [...]
Read More »If you’re a regular reader of the blog, it will come as no surprise to you that the ecological health of the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is considerally worse than depicted in much of the mainstream media — let alone by the tens of millions on dollars of bogus PR spin that BP has purchased on your television screen. Over the last 36 [...]
Read More »How big has the sinkhole in the Louisiana town of Bayou Corne grown? Well, consider this: It’s become so big that even the state’s environment-unfriendly governor, Bobby Jindal, cannot ignore it anymore. Some eight months into the crisis — or maybe two years, if you want to go back to the very first warnings — our GOP governor is going to take the 50-mile short hop to see what’s going [...]
Read More »Sometimes it feels like conversations about the Gulf of Mexico — nearly three years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe unleashed roughly 5 million barrels of fresh crude — take place in parallel universes. Inside a courtroom here in New Orleans, BP and its high-priced lawyers continue to push for lower estimate of how much oil was spilled, while their unending barrage of uptempo TV ads seeks to convince Americans that [...]
Read More »So far about the only thing that hasn’t happened to the beleaguered residents of Louisiana’s Assumption Parish is a plague of locusts. Yet. Since last summer, homeowners in and around the Bayou Corne community, about 70 miles west of New Orleans, have been dealing with the effects of a massive sinkhole. Some 150 families were forced out of their homes in early August, with no indication of when they’ll be [...]
Read More »Meet the new normal on the Gulf Coast, as related by the emergency manager of Gulf Shores, Ala.: Last year almost two million pounds of BP oil was collected from gulf coast beaches. 380 thousand pounds of that came from Alabama. A quick look at a shell line on West Beach and you can see why. “When you think of the number of miles of beach that we have and [...]
Read More »Apparently, Big Oil, Big Gas, and their industrial cronies are used to getting everything exactly their was in the great state of Louisiana. I’m talking about the latest appalling news to come out of Bayou Corne, the small bayou community west of New Orleans that has been literally torn apart by a massive, manmade sinkhole. If you’ve been following the saga of the Texas Brine Co., state regulators and some [...]
Read More »There can be something magical about Christmas in the Louisiana bayou. But not this year — not in the small community of Bayou Corne, some 70 miles west of New Orleans. Here. some 150 families have been forced out of their homes since the brutally hot dog days of summer, back in August — and they still don’t know when they’re coming back. Efforts to fix the environmental crisis that’s [...]
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