Category Archives: Restoration
The federally approved plan amounts to a sweetheart deal for BP, and a huge black eye for Louisiana and the entire Gulf Coast. The plan – which transitions out of the cleanup phase into the restoration phase – allows BP to walk away from miles and miles of contaminated coastline, marshlands and beaches that are still being hit by fresh, highly toxic oil. A high-ranking Louisiana public official slammed the [...]
Read More »BP’s Macondo Well spewed sweet Louisiana crude for 87 straight, miserable days last summer. By April 30, 2010, Macondo oil choked nearly 4,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico. The gushing well surrounded itself with an 80-square-mile “kill zone,” void of any life of any kind (other than unprotected cleanup workers). It fouled more than 320 miles of coastline in Louisiana alone, much of it delicate, ecologically vital marshland. [...]
Read More »Drew Landry, an out-of-work Cajun crawfisherman, caused a stir last year when he whipped out a guitar and, literally, started singing the blues during his testimony before the National Oil Spill Commission – the body established by the White House to investigate the causes and impacts of the BP spill. My guess is it was a first for all involved. But one thing’s for sure: There’s nothing like music to [...]
Read More »Over a year into the Gulf nightmare, who’s advocating for the victims of BP’s massive oil spill? Who’s going to ensure they’re made whole? Claims czar Kenneth Feinberg tried, rather unconvincingly, to assume the role of independent “victim champion” when he became administer of BP’s $20 billion compensation fund back in August 2010. But the “neutral arbiter” act didn’t fly – some little detail about BP paying Mr. Feinberg a [...]
Read More »Apparently we’ve learned absolutely nothing from the regulatory failures that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, at least not here in Louisiana. Against the backdrop of BP’s 200-million-gallon spill and botched cleanup efforts, a group of tone deaf Louisiana legislators has introduced three bills that would drastically limit the liability of the oil and gas industry in site contamination cases. At issue are “legacy claims,” lawsuits that address past and [...]
Read More »If there was ever any doubt that BP’s “cleanup” would be a monumental failure, we now have the scientific data to prove our allegations and to support our calls for additional cleanup efforts. In late March 2011, Paul Orr and his team from the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper conducted a 50-mile boat patrol and sampling tour of Breton Sound, which lies just off the southeast coast of Louisiana. The excursion was [...]
Read More »It’s been more than a year since BP’s runaway Macondo Well began filling the northern waters of the Gulf of Mexico with more than 200 million gallons of sweet crude, fouling shorelines from Louisiana’s marshes to the Florida Panhandle. As our nation’s worst man-made environmental disaster unfolded, it quickly became the lead story of the summer – with photos of oiled birds and video of gushing oil entrancing the American [...]
Read More »As we move beyond the first-year anniversary of the Gulf oil spill, scientists are slamming BP for taking “far too long” in allocating tens of millions in research funding to assess environmental damages tied to the disaster. In fact, some scientists say it may already be too late to ever get an accurate evaluation – and I would argue that’s got BP execs high-fiving in Houston. The immediacy of the [...]
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