Posts by david.manthos@skytruth.org

On Jan. 20, Taylor Energy will host a public forum in Baton Rouge, La., to explain what efforts they have taken to respond to the ongoing oil spill in Mississippi Canyon Block 20 (MC-20) – the former site of Taylor Energy Platform #23051. Over eleven years ago Hurricane Ivan triggered a subsea landslide which destroyed the platform and buried 28 wells under a hundred or more feet of mud and sediment. The spill…

On September 3, 2015, Waterkeeper Alliance, Apalachicola Riverkeeper, and Louisiana Environmental Action Network, represented by the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and the National Environmental Law Center, signed a settlement agreement with Taylor Energy. The environmental groups initiated the lawsuit three years ago in response to the lack of transparency surrounding the spill and Taylor Energy’s response efforts. This agreement signals the end of this veil of secrecy. This settlement will make it easier…

Op-Ed published on March 28, 2015 in The Virginian-Pilot by Cynthia Sarthou, Exec. Director at Gulf Restoration Network When the Obama administration announced it would open the Atlantic Coast to offshore oil drilling in January, references to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill began almost immediately. While Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell asserted the government had "learned from the challenges" of the 2010 disaster, those alarmed by the decision to open the Atlantic reminded…

Sept. 3, 2014 by John Amos, SkyTruth - Playing Hide-and-Seek! With an Oil Tanker... Supertankers loaded with crude have been making the news recently, mostly because they can't find a place to sell the stuff. These tankers departed from Kurdistan, but Iraq claims the oil they carry is their property and the Kurds don't have the right to sell it.  This global political dispute is playing out on the water in an interesting,…

By Bob Marshall, Al Shaw, Brian Jacobs, et al. Originally published on ProPublica - http://projects.propublica.org/louisiana/ Louisiana is drowning, quickly. In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy. And it’s going to get worse, even…

By Anna Hrybyk, Program Manager at Louisiana Bucket Brigade. Posted June 4, 2014 An EF-1 tornado, about 150 yards wide with maximum winds estimated near 105 mph, hit Garyville about 5:30 a.m [on Wednesday, May 28, 2014], the National Weather Service said.  The tornado damaged the cooling towers at the Marathon Refinery in Garyville that led to the complete shutdown of the crude unit. Image - iWitness Pollution Map Report submitted on May 28th…

By Lindsay Abrams; Original Post at Salon

The energy company insists the Gulf has recovered. The people who live there say it still has a long way to go.

The best time to find tarballs on Louisiana’s shorelines is directly after a thunderstorm, when the waves churn up the oil carpeting the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and deposit its weathered remnants onto the beach.

That’s according to Jonathan Henderson, and he should know – he’s been tracking tar for four years now, ever since the day, back in April 2010, when he took his first flight over the Gulf of Mexico to survey the plume of oil shooting out from BP’s Macondo Prospect. He’s taken some 200 trips since. These days, he tends to travel to Grand Isle State Park and Elmer’s Island. The oil no longer covers those places, as it once did, but despite what you may have heard about the cleanup being complete, fresh tarballs keep reappearing. Especially after storms, Henderson’s liable to find them by the thousands.

March 25, 2014; 12:20 PM – The 168,000-gallon fuel oil spill that happened Saturday near Galveston, Texas caused the Coast Guard to temporarily close the Houston Ship Channel.  That's a very busy, narrow waterway connecting the Port of Houston with the Gulf of Mexico and overseas ports.  In addition to the environmental consequences of this heavy oil spill, including the threat to shorebirds at the peak of their spring migration, this closure has caused a big-time backup of shipping traffic.…

Text reposted from SkyTruth, images from Gulf Restoration Network Savvy SkyTruth Alerts users may have noticed that we haven't published any new oil or hazmat spill reports from the Coast Guard-operated National Response Center (NRC) since February 20.  If you go directly to the NRC website, you see a "down for maintenance" message.  Polluters and concerned citizens can still submit reports to the NRC by phone, at 1-800-424-8802.  But without the website, we can't search for…