Tag Archives: spill

VIDEO: Is the BP Oil Spill Cleanup Still Making People Sick?

by LelandDuCane Posted on May 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, when an oil rig explosion sent five million barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the company behind the spill, BP, went swiftly into damage-control mode. One of its first steps was to buy up a third of the world’s supply of chemical dispersants, including one called Corexit that was designed to concentrate oil into droplets that sink into the water column, where in theory they can be degraded by bacteria and stay off beaches.

After the spill, roughly two million gallons of Corexit were dumped into the Gulf. There’s just one problem: Despite BP’s protestations to the contrary, Corexit is believed to be highly toxic—not just to marine life but also to the workers who were spraying it and locals living nearby—according to a new segment on Vice that will air tonight on HBO at 11 pm ET. (For its part, BP has said that its use of dispersants was approved by the federal government and that it isn’t aware of any data that the disperants pose a health threat.)

The show follows cleanup workers, local doctors, and shrimpers, and suggests that four years after the spill, Corexit contamination could be nearly as big a problem as the oil itself. You can watch a short clip from tonight’s show above.

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VIDEO: Is the BP Oil Spill Cleanup Still Making People Sick?

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Bird body count still rising following Galveston Bay oil spill

by GerardoAmbrose Posted on April 7, 2014

Bird body count still rising following Galveston Bay oil spill

By

NOAA

There have been so many oil spills lately — from trains, from pipelines, from barges, from a refinery – that it’s easy to forget about the particulars of each one. Unless you’re an unlucky local resident or an emergency responder.

In Texas, where more than 100,000 gallons of heavy fuel spilled into Galveston Bay two weeks ago following a collision between a barge and a ship, the Coast Guard has recovered more than 300 oiled birds – nearly all of them dead. The Texas Tribune reports:

While the Houston Ship Channel is open and fishermen have mostly resumed activities in the bay, officials say they are at least several weeks away from fully containing the fuel oil, and its devastating effects on shorebirds are becoming increasingly apparent. The effects of the spill, [said David Newstead, a research scientist at the Corpus Christi-based nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program], are particularly troubling in the ecologically sensitive area in which the birds have already been in peril from human activity.

Newstead and Coast Guard officials said birds affected by the spill include ducks, herrings, herons, brown and white pelicans, sanderlings, loons, willets, black-bellied plover and the piping plover, which is classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. …

Newstead said he has surveyed Mustang Island, about 200 miles southwest of the initial spill site, and observed at least 500 more birds with some traces of oil. The soiled birds came into contact with the contaminated water as it washed ashore.

Birds and shorelines aren’t the only things being smeared with toxic oil in the wake of the shipping accident. An attorney representing a shrimp boat captain said Friday that his client had pulled up an “entire catch” that was “covered with oil.”


Source
Galveston Bay Oil Spill Leaves Hundreds of Birds Oiled, Texas Tribune
Feds seize cargo ship involved in oil spill, Galveston Daily News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Bird body count still rising following Galveston Bay oil spill

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No rules governed tank that leaked coal-cleaning poison into W.Va. river

by 0df53x21 Posted on February 11, 2014

No rules governed tank that leaked coal-cleaning poison into W.Va. river

By

The National Guard

The National Guard delivered emergency water supplies in West Virginia after Freedom Industries ruined the regular water supplies.

The Jan. 9 spill of as much as 10,000 gallons from a steel tank next to the Elk River didn’t just poison water supplies relied upon by 300,000 West Virginians. It revealed holes in state and federal safety rules big enough to drive hazmat-loaded trucks through.

The tanks that Freedom Industries uses to store chemicals at its facility in Charleston are more than 50 years old, and company officials knew that chemicals were being stored in them in ways that did not meet industry or EPA standards.

Environmental consultants audited storage drums for the company late last year, but never inspected the drum that leaked and contaminated water supplies. Its contents — a toxic, little-understood coal-cleaning stew of 4-Methylcyclohexane methanol and something the company calls stripped PPH – were considered nonhazardous under federal law. Still, if anybody had cared to check, they would have discovered that a leak from the aging drum could flow straight through gravel and cinder blocks and into the river.

That’s according to congressional testimony by Rafael Moure-Eraso, chair of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

State of West Virginia

Here are the holes in Freedom Industries’ leaky tank.

“While there are laws prohibiting polluting to waterways with a spill, there are not really any clear, mandatory standards for how you site, design, maintain, and inspect non-petroleum tanks at a storage facility,” Moure-Eraso told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee during a hearing on Monday. “Under existing state and federal laws these tanks, including tank 396, were not regulated by the state or federal government.”

You probably want some kind of an explanation from Freedom Industries about its sloppy chemical-storing practices. But bad luck, because its officials skipped the hearing, even though it was held right in Charleston. The Huffington Post reports:

Freedom Industries, which owns the storage facility that leaked chemicals into the Elk River, did not have any representatives at a hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held in the state capital Monday morning. The company’s president, Gary Southern, had been invited to testify. …

“The one empty seat … belongs to the one entity at the epicenter of all this,” said Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), “the one who totally blew it.” …

A representative for Freedom Industries referred questions on the company’s absence at the hearing to its lawyer, Paul Vey. Southern did not attend the hearing, Vey said, “simply because the company is relatively small and we are focused exclusively on remediation of the spill.”

And you probably want to know whether the water supplies are now safe. Again — bad luck. There’s no straight answer. That’s partly due to the fact that so little is known about the chemicals that spilled.

“That’s in a way a difficult thing to say because everyone has a different definition of safe,” state safety official Letitia Tierney told representatives when she was asked whether the water is now safe.

Meanwhile, ThinkProgress reports that West Virginians have begun receiving exorbitant water bills — the price of flushing poisonous water out of their plumbing systems. West Virginia American Water has promised discounts to help residential customers meet the costs of flushing 500 gallons of water apiece. But those discounts have been missing from recent bills.


Source
CSB Testimony from Transportation and Infrastructure Field Hearing on Charleston, WV Chemical Spill, U.S. Chemical Safety Board
The Company Behind West Virginia’s Chemical Spill Skips Congressional Hearing, The Huffington Post
Still No Answer if Water is Safe, WSAZ

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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No rules governed tank that leaked coal-cleaning poison into W.Va. river

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Freedom Industries kept West Virginia spill details secret

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on January 27, 2014

Freedom Industries kept West Virginia spill details secret

By

National Guard

If you had been among Freedom Industries’ dozens of employees, you would have known more than your neighbors about the contents of a toxic spill that left hundreds of thousands of West Virginians without safe tap water recently.

After state officials discovered on Jan. 9 that chemicals had gushed out of a storage drum and into Elk River, the company told them that the drum contained something called 4-Methylcyclohexane methanol. The poison is used by the state’s coal miners. Little is known about the precise hazards that it poses, but it has sickened hundreds of people.

What the company didn’t tell the government until last week was that the drum also contained something that they call stripped PPH. The company did, however, tell its own workers about that second chemical in an email immediately after the spill. So, lucky them.

Stripped PPH was mixed in with the other chemicals in the drum at a concentration of about 6 percent. A material safety data sheet (MSDS) provided to state officials says stripped PPH contains a complex mixture of polyglycol ethers. “The specific chemical identity is being withheld as ‘trade secret,’” the company wrote in the safety document, which was dated Oct. 15, 2013.

According to the MSDS, stripped PPH causes skin irritation and “serious” eye irritation. Workers are warned to wear protective gloves, goggles, and face protection whenever they work with it. And in case of a chemical spill? “Persons not wearing protective equipment should be excluded from the area of the spill until cleanup has been completed.”

So nice of them to let us know. Here’s more from the AP:

The company at the center of the West Virginia water crisis immediately knew a second chemical leaked from its plant into the Elk River, and told its workers in an email, according to a state environmental official.

However, Freedom Industries did not let state government officials know about the second chemical until days after the spill. And state environmental department official Mike Dorsey said most company employees did not skim far enough into the email to see that information. …

“The explanation I was given was that they had the information on the very first day,” said Dorsey, chief of the state environmental agency’s homeland security and emergency response division.

After learning of the presence of the second chemical, state officials tested for it, but found no traces of it.

Meanwhile, more than 500 people have now been hospitalized with ailments linked to the spill. And the company is enjoying newfound bankruptcy protection from lawsuits.


Source
W.Va. official: Spill company knew of 2nd chemical, AP
PPH, stripped, Freedom Industries via West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Freedom Industries kept West Virginia spill details secret

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Panel Blocks Gas Pipeline in New Jersey Pinelands

by Myrna Posted on January 11, 2014

The vote keeps the gas line, which Gov. Chris Christie’s government had lobbied for, out of the fragile area. Continue reading here: Panel Blocks Gas Pipeline in New Jersey Pinelands ; ;Related ArticlesAppeals Court Upholds BP Oil Spill SettlementChemical Spill Fouls Water in West VirginiaThousands Without Water After Spill in West Virginia ;

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Panel Blocks Gas Pipeline in New Jersey Pinelands

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Oil spill stretches 10 miles down a river in Mississippi

by donkorleone842 Posted on July 3, 2013

Oil spill stretches 10 miles down a river in Mississippi

By John Upton

The Wayne County News on

Youtube

See those dark globs? They’re oil floating down the Chickasawhay River.

A 10-mile stretch of Mississippi’s Chickasawhay River was fouled by more than 200 barrels of oil after equipment at a drilling well malfunctioned.

The Wayne County News reported in an online video that cleanup efforts were complicated by the oil spill’s remote location. The U.S. EPA, Coast Guard, and state and local authorities have responded to the spill, the newspaper reported.

The spill was reported by Logan Oil on Thursday, and the emergency clean-up operations are expected to continue at least until the end of this week. From WHLT:

Joseph Dunlap of the Wayne County Emergency Management Agency says oil flowed roughly four miles down the Chickasawhay River, which is located about one mile from the oil field.

Mississippi Oil and Gas Board (MSOGB) field director Allen Floyd says the spill had been contained, and its environmental effects were expected to be “minimal.”

Floyd says the spill happened because of an equipment malfunction. It’s still under investigation.

“The spill has been contained. There have been small amounts of oil as far down as ten miles from where the oil entered the river,” says Floyd.

Though the Oil and Gas Board is trying to dismiss the spill as “minimal,” Angela Atchison, head of the Wayne County Emergency Management Agency, deemed it “significant.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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