Industrial-"Accident"

By Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) BATTLE CREEK, Noon, on December 13th: After activist and Kalamazoo resident Chris Wahmhoff’s felony pretrial, Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) will hold a press conference to raise awareness about chemical oil dispersants found in the Kalamazoo River. Earlier this year Chris protested Enbridge Energy by skateboarding into their pipeline and stopping construction. He was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer and faces 2 years in prison. ...

By Justin McCurry and Simon Tisdall / The Guardian Workers have begun the delicate task of removing spent fuel rods from a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, more than two-and-a-half years after the facility suffered a triple meltdown. The operation to remove more than 1,331 used fuel assemblies, and 202 unused assemblies, began on Monday and is expected to take just over a year. Decommissioning the entire site is expected to take at least 30 years. ...

By Soumya Karlamangla / Los Angeles Times A 90-car train derailed and exploded in rural Alabama early Friday morning, spilling its crude oil cargo into the surrounding wetlands and igniting a fire so intense that officials said it will take 24 hours to burn out. No one was injured. The train was crossing a timber trestle above a wetland near Aliceville late Thursday night when 20 railcars and two of three locomotives derailed. Earlier reports said fewer cars had derailed. ...

By Georgia Institute of Technology If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic. That’s according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico. The study found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased toxicity of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil alone. In toxicity tests in the lab, the mixture’s effects increased mortality of rotifers, a microscopic grazing animal at the base of the Gulf’s food web. The findings are published online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the February 2013 print edition. ...

By Leo Hickman / The Guardian Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed. The disclosure came as Decc said on Thursday that the government had offered a “record-breaking” 167 new licences to oil and gas companies seeking to drill in the North Sea. A further 61 “blocks”, or licences, are under environmental assessment. ...

By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica On a cold, overcast afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the earth. The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling – was described in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons. ...

By Carla Salazar / Associated Press More than 100 rural Peruvians have been sickened by the spill of a toxic copper concentrate produced at one of the Andean country’s biggest mines, authorities said Friday. The Ancash state regional health office said 140 people were treated for ‘‘irritative symptoms caused by the inhalation of toxins’’ after a pipeline carrying the concentrate under high pressure burst open in their community. Most of the injured had joined in efforts to prevent liquid copper slurry from reaching a nearby river after the pipeline linking the Antamina copper mine to the coast ruptured last week in the village of Santa Rosa de Cajacay, said the community’s president, Hilario Moran. ...

By University of Central Florida The largest oil spill on open water to date and other environmental factors led to the historically high number of dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico, concludes a two-year scientific study released today. A team of biologists from several Gulf of Mexico institutions and the University of Central Florida in Orlando published their findings in the journal PLoS ONE. For the past two years, scientists have been trying to figure out why there were a high number of dolphin deaths, part of what’s called an “unusual mortality event” along the northern Gulf of Mexico. ...

By Claudia Adrien / University of Florida The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill temporarily worsened existing manmade problems in Louisiana’s salt marshes such as erosion, but there may be cause for optimism, according to a new study. A study appearing online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the 2010 spill killed off salt marsh plants 15 to 30 feet from the shoreline and this plant die off resulted in a more-than-doubled rate of erosion along the marsh edge and subsequent permanent marsh habitat loss. Vegetation farther from shore was relatively untouched by the incoming oil. ...

By EcoWatch To borrow a popular hockey term, Canada has scored a hat trick of the worst kind: Three major oil spills in just over one month. The culprit this time around is Enbridge, the Calgary, Alberta-based operator of the world’s longest crude oil and liquids pipeline system, situated in Canada and the U.S. On June 19 the company confirmed that about 1,450 barrels (230,000 litres) of crude oil spilled from a pumping station onto farmland near Elk Point, Alberta, according to The Globe and Mail. Fortunately, this spill managed to occur in an area devoid of waterways. ...