As I write this, Hurricane Matthew — a monster Category 4 storm — is just hours away from striking the central Florida coast. Millions of people have evacuated over the last day or so, and those who’ve stayed behind face an enormous risk from winds as high as 140 mph, from storm surges as great as nine feet or more, and other hazards such as falling trees. The entire nation...
Labor Day weekend hasn’t been a holiday from fear along the East Coast — especially at the Jersey Shore, which is normally booming with tourists from the traditional end of summer vacation. As I write this, Tropical Storm Hermine is strengthening into a hurricane — just as it was when it battered central Florida on its meandering journey northward — and threatening to lash...
If you follow environmental issues, you know and understand this basic fact of American life: Poor communities — especially those populated by people of color — are much, much more likely to get dumped on than places where affluent folks live. If you show me a lead smelter, a trash incinerator or a hazardous-waste dump, there’s an excellent chance that the people living on the...
If this blog could be said to have a theme this summer, it would be this: The Gulf of Mexico, under stress. The tragedy, of course, is how much of that stress has been caused by BP’s recklessness — the millions of barrels of oil that gushed forth from its destroyed Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010 that continues to pollute white sandy beaches with tar balls (many of them larded with...
On April 15, 2014, with the fourth anniversary of the massive Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico just days away, British Petroleum – the rig’s operator — issued a press release that caught many people off-guard. BP announced that its “active cleanup” of oil pollution in the Gulf had officially ended. The statement by the British energy giant did not say that...
When is it ever going to stop? I’m talking about BP’s oil pollution, which continues to bombard our beautiful beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, and continues to make our marine life ill. Don’t forget that it’s now been 50 long months since BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig blew up off the coast of Louisiana, killed 11 people, and began the long process of...
BP continues to tell the public that its 2010 oil spill is receding into the pages of history, that the cleanup is essentially over and that the devastation caused by the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon is now behind us. But the evidence tells a different story. From western Louisiana all the way to Florida, tar balls and even larger oily blobs called tar mats continue to assault the white...
A stunning scientific study, released earlier this year with little fanfare, found that undersea currents pushed oil from BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as far as Florida’s Tampa Bay and is linked to diseased fish populations off that state’s lower Gulf waters. The report, published by researchers from the University of South Florida, shows that BP’s toxic oil...
The calendar just flipped over to 2014 — that means that it won’t be long until April, and the 4th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot has happened since then — Osama bin Laden has been killed, Occupy Wall Street came and then mostly disappeared, Mitt Romney re-emerged, ran for president, lost, and dropped off the radar screen. But some...
It was just earlier this month that I told you about tests that Marco Kaltofen — the chemical engineer who has worked with me on analyzing samples from the BP oil spill since the early days after the 2010 accident — conducted on a tar mat that came ashore on a Louisiana barrier island called Isle Grand Terre. He reported that the giant blob — which caused state officials to...
