Tag Archives: accident

Notorious Coal Baron Don Blankenship Sentenced to a Year in Prison

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in West Virginia sentenced former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship to a year in prison on Wednesday for conspiring to commit mine safety violations at his company’s Upper Big Branch mine during a period leading up to the explosion there that left 29 miners dead in 2010.

The mountaintop estate where Blankenship once hosted visitors. Read MoJo‘s chronicle of Blankenship’s rise and fall in West Virginia. Stacy Kranitz

Blankenship was convicted of the misdemeanor charge in December, but the conviction was explicitly not linked to the Upper Big Branch disaster itself and Blankenship’s attorney worked hard to ensure the accident was hardly mentioned during the trial. And that verdict was a disappointment to prosecutors; he was found not guilty of the more serious felony charges of making false statements to federal regulators in the aftermath of the blast in order to boost Massey’s stock price. (Had he been convicted on all counts, he would have faced up to 30 years in prison.) The conspiracy conviction rested on evidence of Blankenship’s domineering management style, which emphasized profits over the federal mine safety laws designed to avert underground explosions:

The attention to detail that made Blankenship such an effective bean counter may also be his undoing. He constantly monitored every inch of his operation and wrote memos instructing subordinates to move coal at all costs. “I could Krushchev you,” he warned in a handwritten memo to one Massey official whose facilities Blankenship thought were underperforming. He called another mine manager “literally crazy” and “ridiculous” for devoting too many of his miners to safety projects. Despite repeated citations by the MSHA, Blankenship instructed Massey executives to postpone safety improvements: “We’ll worry about ventilation or other issues at an appropriate time. Now is not the time.” And this is only what investigators gleaned from the documents they could find: Hughie Stover, Blankenship’s bodyguard and personal driver—and the head of security at Upper Big Branch—ordered a subordinate to destroy thousands of pages of documents, while the government’s investigation was ongoing. (Stover was sentenced to three years in prison in 2012 for lying to federal investigators and attempting to destroy evidence.)

Before he stepped down as Massey’s CEO in 2010, Blankenship had built the company into one of the largest coal producers in the United States and become a polarizing figure in his home state, where he bankrolled the rise of the Republican Party, pushed climate denial, and crushed unions. For more on Blankenship, read my piece from the magazine on his rise and fall.

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Notorious Coal Baron Don Blankenship Sentenced to a Year in Prison

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450 People Are Still Missing After a Passenger Ship Capsizes on China’s Yangzte River

Mother Jones

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A passenger boat carrying 458 people capsized and sank on the Yangtze River on Monday, according to Chinese state media. Just eight people have been rescued so far, and 400 remain missing, with rescue efforts being hampered by bad weather, according to Xinhua, the state-controlled news agency. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is currently heading to the accident site, CCTV has reported.

The news was first published by Xinhua just after 6 a.m. local time, more than eight hours after the accident reportedly occurred on what is one of the world’s largest and busiest rivers; passenger ferries, as well as all manner of commercial barges, are common on the Yangtze. The boat was en route from Nanjing to Chongqing, a megacity in southwest China. According to the news agency, the rescued captain and chief engineer said the vessel had been caught in a “cyclone.” (Official weather predictions for the area indicated the risk of short-term severe precipitation, thunderstorms, or gales.)

A conflicting report carried by CCTV America, the US-targeted branch of the state-run TV station, put the time of the accident at 11 p.m. local time, an hour and a half after the Xinhua report.

State news media says the boat, known as the Eastern Star, was carrying 405 Chinese passengers, 5 travel agency workers, and 47 crew, and could carry a maximum of 534 people.

A tugboat capsized on the Yangzte in January, killing 22.

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450 People Are Still Missing After a Passenger Ship Capsizes on China’s Yangzte River

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Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

Shutterstock

The Mississippi River in New Orleans.

The oil industry is a champion of innovation. When it comes to finding new ways of sullying the environment, its resourcefulness knows no bounds.

An oil-hauling barge collided with a vessel pushing grain in the Mississippi River on Saturday, causing an estimated 31,500 gallons of crude to leak through a tear in its hull. The accident closed 65 miles of the already disgustingly polluted waterway upstream from the Port of New Orleans for two days while workers tried to contain and suck up the spilled oil.

The accident highlighted a little-noted side effect of the continent’s oil boom. Not only is crude being ferried from drilling operations to refineries in leaky pipelines and explosion-prone trains — it’s also being moved over water bodies with growing frequency. Bloomberg reports:

“We’re facing the imminent risk of a barge disaster or a rail disaster” as more oil is shipped to the Gulf of Mexico for refining, Jonathan Henderson, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, said by phone after attending a meeting with U.S. Coast Guard officials. …

Barge and tanker shipments of crude from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast jumped from virtually nothing in 2005 to 21.5 million barrels in 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The U.S. Gulf received a record 4.9 million barrels of crude from the Midwest in October.

And if the Coast Guard gets its way and lets frackers ship their wastewater on barges, next up could be spills of radioactive liquid waste containing undisclosed chemicals. 


Source
Mississippi Oil Spill Highlights Risk of U.S. Oil Boom, Bloomberg

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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Oil is spilling from trains, pipelines … and now barges

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Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

Zach Bonnell

Looking for a way to warm yourself through this bitter North American cold snap? Just huddle around the nearest train tracks in hopes that one of the countless oil-hauling trains traversing the continent will pass by and combust.

It hadn’t even been two weeks since a derailed train laden with crude exploded in North Dakota when a similar accident occurred last night near the village of Plaster Rock in New Brunswick, Canada, just beyond the Maine border.

Of the 15 rear cars that jumped the tracks, four were carrying crude oil and four were carrying propane. Derailed cars burned through the night, and emergency responders were unwilling to get close enough to figure out which of the carriages were ablaze. About 45 nearby homes were evacuated after the accident. Fortunately, no injuries have been reported.

Here is Reuters with a reminder of just how common this kind of accident has become:

A series of disastrous derailments has reignited the push for tougher regulation. A surge in U.S. oil production has drastically increased the number of oil trains moving across the continent as pipelines fail to keep up with growing supply. …

There have been five major accidents in the past year involving a train carrying crude oil. The most devastating occurred in Quebec in July last year, when a runaway train derailed and exploded in the heart of the town of Lac Megantic, killing 47.

So long as North America’s oil-drilling boom continues, these kinds of disasters will likely continue — but there are hopes that new U.S. federal rules expected this year will see the most puncture-prone models of oil-hauling train cars phased out or retrofitted.


Source
Train carrying oil derails, catches fire in New Brunswick, Canada, Reuters

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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Yet another oil train explodes, this time in New Brunswick, Canada

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One of the awful things about a nuclear meltdown could be the traffic

One of the awful things about a nuclear meltdown could be the traffic

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Get me out of here!

It’s hard to imagine a worse traffic jam than the traffic jam that slows your escape from a nuclear meltdown.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office is warning other federal agencies that they need to be thinking about that scenario as they plan emergency responses to nuclear accidents.

Current planning focuses on evacuating or sheltering people living and working within a 10-mile radius of a nuclear power plant. Such planning assumes that everybody living, say, 11 miles from an exploding nuclear reactor would sit on their asses watching the disaster unfold on CNN. And the GAO thinks that’s unlikely. Those people might instead rush into their cars and onto the streets in an understandably panicked bid to escape the area, worsening traffic congestion and making escape more difficult for those closer to the accident.

From a GAO report published last week:

Those in the 10-mile zone have been shown to be generally well informed about these emergency preparedness procedures and are likely to follow directions from local and state authorities in the event of a radiological emergency. In contrast, the agencies do not require similar information to be provided to the public outside of the 10-mile zone and have not studied public awareness in this area. Therefore, it is unknown to what extent the public in these areas is aware of these emergency preparedness procedures, and how they would respond in the event of a radiological emergency. Without better information on the public’s awareness and potential response in areas outside the 10-mile zone, [the Nuclear Regulatory Commission] may not be providing the best planning guidance to licensees and state and local authorities.

Four senators requested that the GAO conduct the study after the Associated Press published a series in 2011 on weaknesses in emergency planning around nuclear plants. From a new AP article:

Environmental and anti-nuclear groups have pressed federal regulators to expand planning to 25 miles for evacuation and 100 miles for contaminated food. They also want community exercises that postulate a simultaneous nuclear accident and natural disaster.

Nuclear sites were originally picked mainly in rural areas to lessen the impact of accidents. However, in its 2011 series, the AP reported population growth of up to 350 percent within 10 miles of nuclear sites between 1980 and 2010. About 120 million Americans — almost 40 percent — live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, according to the AP’s analysis of Census data. The series also reported shortcomings in readiness exercises for simulated accidents, including the failure to deploy emergency personnel around the community, reroute traffic, or practice any real evacuations.

The series further documented how federal regulators have relaxed safety standards inside aging plants to keep them within the rules and avoid the need for shutdowns.

Asked about the GAO study, Paul Blanch, a retired engineer who has worked on nuclear safety for the industry, questioned whether it’s even possible to plan for an effective, managed evacuation of residents in a very populated area. “I absolutely believe they would panic, and they’d clog the roads,” he said.

NRC spokesperson Neil Sheehan apparently took some time out of his busy day to mull the report before emailing a thoughtful, thorough response to the AP: “We disagree with the view that evacuations cannot be safely carried out.”

OK then.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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One of the awful things about a nuclear meltdown could be the traffic

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Louisiana pipeline fire, now extinguished, sickened residents

Louisiana pipeline fire, now extinguished, sickened residents

Coast GuardThe fire on Friday, three days after a tug boat and pipeline ignited in Louisiana.

Air pollution from a huge pipeline and tug boat fire, which raged 30 miles south of New Orleans from Tuesday until it was extinguished on Friday, sickened nearby residents with respiratory ailments and other conditions.

Two days after the fire ignited, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade went door-to-door in LaFitte, La., just east of the bayou where the accident happened, and found that one out of every 10 residents surveyed suffered breathing difficulty, sore eyes, headaches, or other health problems triggered by the acrid pollution plume. About twice that number reported smelling the smoke, and nearly two-thirds said they saw the smoke or fire. “I have bronchial asthma, and I couldn’t breathe very well,” one resident told the nonprofit.

Health problems could have been far worse had northerly winds not blown the smoke away from the tiny Jefferson Parish community.

The Coast Guard said no oil spilled into the water because of the accident, which happened when a tug boat pushing a crude-oil-filled barge crashed into a submerged pipeline owned by Chevron. The liquid petroleum gas from the pipeline triggered a fire on the tug boat that burned for days, but the oil barge was unharmed.

An oily sheen was visible in the water but the Coast Guard dismissed it as ash from the burned gas, which it said did not pose a pollution problem.

Anne Rolfes of the Bucket Brigade disagrees with the Coast Guard’s assessment that the accident did not damage the Gulf environment. She said the release of liquid petroleum gas and burned carbon into the Gulf waters was environmentally damaging, and she criticized government officials for downplaying the dangers that it posed.

“It defies logic to say that when you spill oil and gas and chemicals into an ocean that there is no pollution,” Rolfes told Grist on Sunday. “Of course it’s a problem.”

Last week’s pipeline fire garnered some national media attention because of the spectacular size of the long-burning fire and because of the extraordinary nature of the crash, which risked blowing up or leaking the 2,200 barrels of crude oil aboard the barge.

But Rolfes pointed out that it was no freak event. Federal data show that thousands of smaller fires and accidental releases of fossil fuels into the water blight the Gulf every year. Just last month, an oil service boat crashed into a wellhead in the region, unleashing a geyser of oil that sprayed for two days before the leak was staunched. And, of course, BP is currently defending itself in court  against allegations that its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf was the result of gross negligence.

Last week’s accident highlighted the absurd fact that the government doesn’t require gas and oil companies to mark the locations of their wellheads and pipelines in the Gulf. Rolfes thinks that imposing such a rule might be a good idea.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Louisiana pipeline fire, now extinguished, sickened residents

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Oil barge crashes into gas pipeline in Louisiana, triggers big fire

Oil barge crashes into gas pipeline in Louisiana, triggers big fire

Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office

An oil-laden barge crashed into a natural-gas pipeline off the Louisiana coast.

A grotesque collision of fossil-fuel-laden vessels happened in a bayou south of New Orleans on Tuesday evening, where tug-boat operators crashed a barge carrying crude oil into a submerged natural-gas pipeline.

The result was predictable: A spectacular conflagration erupted that injured two of the four members of the tug-boat crew, including the captain, who reportedly suffered burns covering more than three quarters of his body. Emergency crews on Wednesday were scrambling to contain spilled oil spreading south of the accident.

The crash occurred at about 6 p.m. local time 30 miles south of New Orleans on Bayou Perot, according to the Coast Guard.

Pipeline owner Chevron isolated the severed section of line by shutting off some of its valves, and emergency crews allowed the gas left inside it to burn off, The Washington Post reports. Various outlets reported that the barge was carrying more than 2,000 barrels of oil and that the tug boat was fueled with diesel.

The fire burned through the night and past dawn.

The oil spill may be substantial. In a telephone interview on WGNO this morning, while the tug and pipeline still burned, a Coast Guard spokesman said a 30-foot-wide ribbon of “what looks like combusted oil” was heading south from the accident site.

The fishing area and oil and gas field is no stranger to fossil-fuel accidents. Shorelines in the area were heavily polluted following BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the spring and summer of 2010. And in late 2010, three welders were injured when the rig they had been working aboard in the shallow waterway exploded.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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, posts articles to

Facebook

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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Oil barge crashes into gas pipeline in Louisiana, triggers big fire

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ExxonMobil wins and regular folks lose in $1 billion pollution ruling

ExxonMobil wins and regular folks lose in $1 billion pollution ruling

Thomas Hawk

Guess who wins.

Susan and Robert Lazzaro buy bottled water for cooking and drinking. Their jacuzzi sits empty and baths are out of the question. They limit their showers to two minutes or less.

And like many other homeowners in Jacksonville, Md., the Lazarros fear that the savings they invested in their home were wiped out when a local ExxonMobil gas station leaked for more than a month in 2006, poisoning the groundwater upon which they depended.

All was not lost: In 2011, a jury awarded victims of the gasoline leak $1.5 billion in compensation and punitive damages. Of that sum, $5.6 million was to go to the Lazarros.

But we’re talking about an oil giant here. Inevitability ran its course and all suddenly seems lost again.

That’s according to The Baltimore Sun, which reports that Maryland’s highest court on Tuesday rejected $1 billion in punitive damages from the $1.5 billion verdict and also rejected some claims from an earlier case in which $150 million was awarded to a smaller number of plaintiffs. The court ruled that victims of the pollution should not be compensated for emotional distress, nor should ExxonMobil have to pay for monitoring their health. From the article:

Charlie Engelmann, a spokesman for ExxonMobil, said in an email that the company was pleased with the decision.

“The evidence showed that we acted appropriately after the accident and the court has agreed,” Engelmann wrote. “We have apologized to the Jacksonville community and we remain ready to compensate those who were truly damaged by this unfortunate accident. We will continue the cleanup.”

The court rejected all six claims of fraud the jury affirmed in 2011, including ExxonMobil’s alleged willful deceptions of public officials and residents before and after the accident.

While ExxonMobil officials were pleased by the ruling, the Lazarros and their neighbors are left wondering how they will pick up the remnants of their polluted lives. ”We’re all still in a state of shock,” Susan Lazzaro told the newspaper. “It leaves us with such a sense of defeat because we are still living with this nightmare.”

The Associated Press reported that 150 families were affected by Tuesday’s ruling and that new trials have been ordered.

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BP testifies: We knew about ‘big risk’ of explosion

BP testifies: We knew about ‘big risk’ of explosion

U.S. Coast GuardBP knew this could happen before it happened.

BP knew. BP didn’t care.

The company was aware that there was a “big risk” of an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig before that very disaster unfolded, an executive acknowledged Tuesday in court.

“There was a risk identified for a blowout,” Lamar McKay, who was president of BP America at the time of the 2010 explosion, said Tuesday during a civil trial that could see the company forced to fork over tens of billions of dollars in fines and damages to the U.S. government and victims of the oil spill. “The blowout was an identified risk, and it was a big risk, yes.”

That’s according to The New York Times. From the article:

After the April 2010 spill, internal BP documents showed that the company had struggled with a loss of “well control” in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig. And for months before that, it had been concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster.

On June 22, 2009, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

Despite acknowledging that BP had known about the risks of an explosion at the drilling well before it happened, McKay stuck to a strategy that the company’s attorneys concocted to help convince the judge that BP was merely negligible, and not grossly negligible, in causing the accident: He said rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton shared in the blame. From The Guardian:

Robert Cunningham, an attorney for the plaintiffs, repeatedly pressed McKay to concede that BP bore ultimate responsibility for the blowout. McKay repeatedly insisted that managing the hazards was a “team effort.”

“I think that’s a shared responsibility, to manage the safety and the risk,” said McKay, now chief executive of BP’s upstream unit. “Sometimes contractors manage that risk. Sometimes we do. Most of the time it’s a team effort.”

The trial could get really interesting today with Mark Bly, BP’s head of safety at the time of the disaster, expected to testify.

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Another miner death at a mine linked to Massey Energy

Another miner death at a mine linked to Massey Energy

A miner in West Virginia was killed last night.

From Ken Ward, Jr., at the Charleston Gazette:

The accident occurred at about 1:30 a.m. today at White Buck Coal Co.’s Pocahontas Mine near Rupert. This is a former Massey Energy operation now controlled by Alpha Natural Resources.

According to state officials, the miner was caught between a scoop and the continuous mining machine — a type of accident that is becoming all too common in the coal-mining industry [PDF]. Unfortunately, we’re still waiting for the Obama administration to move on two regulatory proposals that would help prevent these sorts of fatal accidents.

State officials have identified the miner who was killed as Steve Odell of Mt. Nebo. He had three years of mining experience and was a certified electricial.

As Ward also notes, the White Buck mine was once run by David Craig Hughart, who this week pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy including one related to violations of health and safety standards.

According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration, mining deaths and injuries have dropped dramatically over the years. But then, so has the number of miners. Mining was still one of the most dangerous jobs in America last year.

Coal keeps getting more expensive.

Source

Another W.Va. coal miner dies on the job, Charleston Gazette

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Another miner death at a mine linked to Massey Energy

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