Lafitte resident Lanvin LeBlanc has been fishing his entire life. With more than three decades of shrimping under his belt, he single-handedly runs a 38-ft skiff to bring thousands of pounds of shrimp to market each year. Photo: Craig Guillot Nicky Alfonson in front of hundreds of his crab traps he recovered from Louisiana waters after the oil spill. When officials closed the waters to commercial and recreational fishing between the mouth of the Mississippi River and Pensacola Bay in Florida on May 2, LeBlanc was essentially put out of business. “Everything has just been up in the air. This
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is initiating emergency permitting procedures to expedite cleanup in anticipation of oil coming ashore from the April 20 explosion of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. Corps districts in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisian indicate that they have cut the normally lengthy permitting process to 24-48 hours as authorized under Nationwide Permit 20, which covers those activities subject to the National Oil and Hazardous Pollution Contingency Plan and are performed in accordance with the Spill Control and Countermeasures Plan. Basically, any oil spill cleanup excavation, dredging or remediation in
Like a hurricane menacing the Gulf Coast, the full damage from the destroyed deepwater oil well in British Petroleum’s Mancando field in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be known for many days. Nor will the cost, now estimated to be in the billions, as offshore crews work tirelessly to keep crude from coming onshore and landside volunteers prepare to begin the massive environmental cleanup. How much is at stake could be read more easily in faces than in financial calculations. “I look in the eyes of fisherman and people making their living on the coast, and you just see fear,”
Crews at the U.S. Energy Dept.’s Hanford nuclear-waste site in Washington state have placed the first of six massive, 50-ton shield doors at the site’s high-level waste treatment facility with a fit no wider than a human hair, say officials of San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc., design-contractor for the $12.2-billion project on the 560-sq-mile site. Photo: Bechtel National Inc. Crews supervise installation of the first of six 50-ton radiation shield doors at Hanford site. Photo: Bechtel National Inc. The shield door is in a key area of the 65-acre plant complex, which, when completed, will vitrify high-level nuclear waste now
Nashville and Middle Tennessee businesses and individuals are cleaning up and trying to return to thousands of buildings and homes inundated by floodwaters in a “once-in-one-thousand-year event.” Photo: AP/Wideworkd The Grand Ole Opry House and related buildings sitting in floodwater in Nashville. With one of the city’s two water plants still underwater, Nashville and neighboring Williamson County are under a mandatory water conservation order. Power is out, at least until Friday, for a chunk of downtown after floodwaters knocked out underground transformers at a substation. The Cumberland River, which runs through Nashville, crested at 51.9 ft late Monday after 13.5
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hopes to use water diversion structures to push water out of sensitive wetland areas and keep away oil that has been drawing near shore since the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. In essence, the Corps is investigating if the rains behind the Nashville flood could help save the Louisiana Coast from the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The unprecedented oil spill is subject to rough winds and tidal flows. Faced with these complications, Chuck Shadie, the Mississippi Valley Division head of
Project managers are struggling with how to remove “Rainier,” a tunnel-boring machine that is stuck 330 ft underground since last year. Until the rig is moved, the area’s $1.8-billion Brightwater treatment plant can’t be finished. + Image Source: King County Original contractor and owner parted ways after TBM bogged down. The parties are negotiating a claim while a replacement team drills ahead. Related Links: Seattle Membrane Plant Treats to Higher Levels “As of May 1, we have no way to remove it and are still working on a plan,” says Gunars Sreibers, project manager with King County, Wash. The tunnel,
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on May 4 unveiled a draft rule to regulate coal ash, for the first time, under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The proposal would require coal-fired powerplants to retrofit existing impoundments, which typically store ash in liquid form, with composite liners. It also would provide strong incentives to eventually close surface impoundments and shift to dry storage in landfills, EPA says. The new scrutiny follows a 2008 collapse of a Tennessee impoundment that spread ash over a 300-sq-mile area of land and water. Environmentalists claim contaminants in coal ash, such as mercury and arsenic,
The Environmental Protection Agency on May 4 unveiled a draft rule to regulate for the first time coal ash under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Under the proposal, coal plants would be required to retrofit existing impoundments, which typically store the ash in liquid form, with composite liners. The proposal also would provide strong incentives for utilities to eventually close the surface impoundments and shift to dry storage in landfills, EPA says. The potential regulation of coal ash has been highly anticipated by environmental groups, who say that contaminants in coal ash—such as mercury cadmium and arsenic—can leach
In April, floods and mudslides killed 249 people in Rio de Janeiro and the outlying metropolitan area, according to fire department officials. Even in a country accustomed to heavy rainfall, flash floods and mudslides, the loss of life was unprecendented, according to Brazilian reports. Photo: O Empreiteiro Slides claimed lives and property in areas where officials ignored illegal construction for years. Niterói city had the highest toll: 164 dead, many of whom were killede in slides. Forty-eight bodies have been recovered. In Niterói's Morro do Bumba district, houses were built illegally on top of a garbage dump that was supposed
RSS
