One of the first stories that I’ve covered since the very beginning of this blog is the threat to Louisiana seafood. It’s certainly an issue that I can relate to, as a New Orleans native who grew up eating the rich harvest from the nearby Gulf of Mexico. And needless to say, it was particularly heartbreaking in the early days to have to report in the early days of the BP Deepwater...
The 5th anniversary of the BP oil spill is causing a lot of journalists to revisit issues that have not received the attention that they deserve in the last couple of years. Take the seafood catch from the Gulf of Mexico — not only a vital source of regional pride but a key driver of jobs in Louisiana and its neighboring states. In the weeks following the Deepwater Horizon disaster...
The U.S. news media continues to largely ignore both the ongoing massive problems at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and the lingering fallout — literally and metaphorically — from the 2011 tsunami and accident there. That’s unfortunately, because practically every week there’s one or more significant developments that show the accident exceeding...
At this stage, some 54 months after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, BP must been thinking that this would all go away. Surely, in their posh boardroom somewhere in the glass skyscrapers over London, overpaid executives imagined that by 2014 the beaches that BP wrecked with its crude oil would be free of tar balls, that the damaged marshes would spring back to life, and that visitors to the...
The news out of Fukushima just keeps getting worse and worse. It’s been more than two years since a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami triggered a nuclear emergency at the massive seaside power plant, operated by TEPCO. It’s hard to know which is more problematic — the frequent human errors, such as a accidental power failure last week that nearly caused cooling water to...
It’s interesting — but also depressing — how you see the same story arc with major environmental disasters, even different types of pollution, on opposite ends of the world. A major catastrophe is the lead story in the news for several weeks. Dire impacts are predicted, but then the journalists move on and the corporate and government flaks take over, assuring us that everything...
Sometimes a name can tell you a lot. In the past, I’ve told you about my enthusiastic support for a New Orleans group, active on Facebook and the Internet, that’s called “Hear the Music, Stop the Noise.” The title makes a powerful point: That it’s possible for a great American city like my hometown to continue having a spectacular and vibrant music scene without...
The crisis involving the Bayou Corne sinkhole in Louisiana just doesn’t stop. In what’s becoming an almost daily headline, the sinkhole grew again, swallowing up more trees and even part of an access road: A 1,500 square-foot section caved in from the edge of a sinkhole in Assumption Parish Tuesday night and pulled down several trees and part of an access road, parish officials said...
A lot has happened over the last few weeks. In the political world, the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sees a new kerfuffle every few hours. Down here in Louisiana, we’ve been whacked by Hurricane Isaac, and on the environmental front we’re still trying to get BP to pay its fair share for all the havoc it’s wreaked in the Gulf. But there’s one thing...
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been consumed with the never-ending fallout from BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Some 29 months after the explosion that killed 11 people and spewed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we’ve seen a hurricane toss BP’s oil onto our once pristine beaches all over again. And we’ve also been fighting it out in the legal...
