Industrial-"Accident"

By Amnesty International A major oil spill in the Niger Delta was far worse than Shell previously admitted, according to an independent assessment obtained by Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), which exposes how the oil giant dramatically under-estimated the quantities involved. The spill in 2008, caused by a fault in a Shell pipeline, resulted in tens of thousands of barrels of oil polluting the land and creek surrounding Bodo, a Niger Delta town of some 69,000 people. ...

By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera “The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.” Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010. Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants. ...

By Karrie Gillett / Press Association Sixty-nine oil and chemical spills in the North Sea have been reported in three months. Eighteen companies were named in a table published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The most recent incident was a gas leak at Total’s Elgin platform on 25 March. Professor Andrew Watterson, the head of the occupational and environmental health research group at the University of Stirling, accused companies of playing down “the potentially catastrophic consequences” of gas and oil leaks. “These are very worrying figures that cannot be slicked over by government agencies and industry,” he said. He blamed “corporate failures” for polluting the sea, and pointed out that the number of reported chemical leaks had more than doubled since 2005. ...

By Agence France-Presse Radioactive iodine was found in kelp off the US West Coast following last year’s earthquake-triggered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, according to a new study. It was already known that radioactive iodine 131 (131-I), carried in the atmosphere, made it across the Pacific within days of the March 11, 2011 tsunami disaster, albeit in minuscule amounts. But marine biologists at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) discovered the radioactive isotope in ocean kelp, which is “one of the strongest plant accumulators of iodine,” within a month of the accident. ...

By Farron Cousins / DeSmog Blog As we here at DeSmogBlog have been covering in exhaustive detail for quite some time now, there is virtually no safe way to perform hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for unconventional oil and gas. Fracking has been linked to numerous problems, including the release of radioactive molecules that cause an array of health problems, earthquakes and groundwater contamination. Cancer, pollution, environmental destruction—all of these things have been linked to the practice of fracking in recent years. ...

By Peter Beaumont / The Guardian A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America’s worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals. The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anaemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems. ...

By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera Hundreds of thousands of people living along the US Gulf Coast have hung their economic lives on lawsuits against BP. Fishermen, in particular, are seeing their way of life threatened with extinction - both from lack of an adequate legal settlement and collapsing fisheries. One of these people, Greg Perez, an oyster fisherman in the village of Yscloskey, Louisiana, has seen a 75 per cent decrease in the amount of oysters he has been able to catch. ...

By Akiko Okazaki / The Asahi Shimbun A mind-boggling 40,000 trillion becquerels of radioactive cesium, or twice the amount previously thought, may have spewed from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant after the March 11 disaster, scientists say. Michio Aoyama, a senior researcher at the Meteorological Research Institute, released the finding at a scientific symposium in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, on Feb. 28. The figure, which represents about 20 percent of the discharge during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, is twice as large as previous estimates by research institutions both in Japan and overseas. ...

By BBC A gas-fuelled fire, with flames as high as 5m, may burn for months in waters off the Niger Delta in south-east Nigeria, Chevron has told the BBC. Two workers died after January’s explosion at the KS Endeavour exploration rig, owned by the US firm. Friends of the Earth says this is the world’s worst such accident in recent years. Chevron spokesman Lloyd Avram says, despite the fire, the situation is now under control and no oil is leaking. ...

By AFP It is the nation’s second water pollution scare in a month, after factories in the southern region of Guangxi contaminated water supplies for millions with toxic cadmium and other waste in January. The ship, reportedly South Korean, was docked in Zhenjiang city on the Yangtze river last Thursday when it leaked phenol – an acid used in detergents – into the water because of a faulty valve, local authorities reported. ...