Oil Rig

A massive oil slick began lapping against the ragged coastline of southeastern Louisiana on Friday, threatening devastation to some of the nation's most fragile wetlands and prompting President Obama to order a moratorium on new drilling projects while the federal government considers new guidelines to prevent future spills. With sharp southeasterly winds driving the crude oil toward shore, federal, state and private crews struggled to contain the slick, which is gushing from a broken well head nearly a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico about 130 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Last week's explosion and sinking of an oil-exploration rig off the coast of Louisiana prompted that state's Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu to call for a federal investigation. She also said the rig's owners should "commit every available resource to learn from this tragic event." Here's what we've already learned: Offshore drilling is more dangerous than industry apologists claim (11 men are believed to have died in the explosion), and it can have environmentally devastating impacts.

As the odds of survival for 11 missing workers diminished Thursday, officials warned that the dramatic explosion and fire that sank an oil rig off the Louisiana coast may pose a serious environmental threat if oil is leaking thousands of feet below the surface. "It certainly has the potential to be a major spill," said Dave Rainey, vice president of Gulf of Mexico exploration for the oil company BP, which leased the Deepwater Horizon, the $600-million mobile offshore rig that vanished underwater Thursday morning.

Eleven offshore oil workers remained missing Wednesday night off the southeastern tip of Louisiana, a day after an oil rig fire sent a column of flame into the sky and pangs of worry through a community built around the risky job of extracting valuable crude from below the ocean floor. The U.S. Coast Guard had helicopters, boats and a plane searching a 900-nautical-square-mile section of the Gulf of Mexico near the mobile offshore drilling unit Deepwater Horizon, which burst into flames after an explosion around 10 p.m. Tuesday.

ALEXANDRA FULLER is driving south from Jackson Hole toward Pinedale to visit the oil patch where 25-year-old Colton Bryant, fourth generation Wyoming oil worker and the subject of Fuller's "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant" (Penguin Press: 204 pp., $23.95) worked and died. On Valentine's Day night 2006, Bryant fell 26 feet from the catwalk around an oil well's conductor pipe. She is listening to Neil Diamond singing "Forever in Blue Jeans," one of Bryant's favorite songs.

Retail gasoline prices declined again in California and nationally over the last week and crude oil futures did the same Monday as the one force with the power to raise them -- Hurricane Dean -- blew toward Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, far south of U.S. oil rigs and pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico. "Disorganized shower activity" was all that the U.S. Gulf Coast area was expected to suffer, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Monday.

A judge on Wednesday dismissed 12 lawsuits in a headline-making case brought by Erin Brockovich-Ellis' law firm against Beverly Hills and its school district, alleging that an oil well at Beverly Hills High School caused cancers in former students. Without explaining his decision, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Wendell Mortimer Jr. granted the request of Beverly Hills and other defendants to dismiss the lawsuits, saying he would issue a more detailed ruling within 25 days.

A Houston-based oil well maintenance firm that failed to allow employee lunch breaks and pay travel costs was ordered to pay $26.5 million to 2,649 workers. Workers covered by the class-action lawsuit filed against Nabors Well Services will get $5,000 to $50,000 each under the arbitrator's decision, plaintiffs' attorney Daniel Palay said. A telephone message left for a Nabors spokeswoman wasn't returned.

They once ruled Southern California, staking claim to broad stretches of coastline and hillsides. Then, in the 1980s, they began vanishing -- driven from their native habitat by tract houses, mini-malls and pesky environmentalists. By the time gasoline prices barreled into the stratosphere this year, local oil wells had become the industrial equivalent of an endangered species. From a peak population of 33,000, they dwindled to about 4,000.