Oil Spill

Like city boosters competing to host the Olympics, hundreds of lawyers representing gulf oil spill victims converged on this mountain town Thursday, promoting their Southern cities as the best equipped and the most convenient venue to handle about 300 lawsuits tied to the disaster. Their arguments before seven federal judges — who will make the decision on where the lawsuits will be heard and who will preside over them — is the critical first step in what is expected to be a long and complicated legal battle over damages caused by the nation's worst oil spill.

A train that derailed and exploded in rural Alabama was hauling 2.7 million gallons of crude oil, according to officials. The 90-car train was crossing a timber trestle above a wetland near Aliceville late Thursday night when approximately 25 rail cars and two locomotives derailed, spilling crude oil into the surrounding wetlands and igniting a fire that was still burning Saturday. Each of the 90 cars was carrying 30,000 gallons of oil, said Bill Jasper, president of the rail company Genesee & Wyoming at a press briefing Friday night.

NEW ORLEANS - Energy giant BP, behind schedule and $50 million over budget drilling a deep-water well, emphasized cost-cutting over safety, causing the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, lawyers said Monday as the company's high-stakes civil trial began. Lawyers used PowerPoint presentations to provide a dramatic recounting of the April 20, 2010, explosion and fire in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 crew members. Workers were preparing to temporarily cap the Macondo well 4,100 feet underwater when it blew up. The 30-story drilling vessel about 50 miles offshore burned for two days before crumpling into the gulf.

WASHINGTON - About sundown one Sunday in September, North Dakota farmer Steven Jensen noticed that his combine was running over wet, squishy earth in a wheat field he was harvesting. When he took a closer look, he saw that oil had coated the wheels and that it was bubbling up about 6 inches high in spots. That was Sept. 29; Jensen contacted authorities immediately. At least 20,600 barrels of oil leaked onto the Jensens' land from a pipeline owned by Tesoro Logistics, one of the largest land-based spills in recent history.

Horrific though the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been, its output is still short of what occurred a century ago in scrubby brush about 110 miles north of Los Angeles — site of the Lakeview gusher. While some experts believe the well off Louisiana has spewed upwards of 60 million gallons of oil into the gulf, the Lakeview well rained about 378 million gallons over an area between the towns of Taft and Maricopa. The spill following the April 20 oil rig explosion in the gulf is, of course, a much bigger environmental and economic disaster.

After spending around half a billion dollars, scientists paid by the government to study the Exxon Valdez oil spill over the last two decades still cannot answer some of the most important questions about the damage it caused or about whether Prince William Sound will fully recover. We're in danger of ending up just as ignorant after the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, as once again, our legal, political and economic systems hobble scientists and pervert the search for answers.

Each news update from the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico tightens a hard knot in my stomach. Alaskans who lived through the Exxon Valdez oil spill feel dark memories resurfacing. We talk about our sadness for the people in the way, people who don't know what's about to hit them. "They still seem to think they'll be able to contain this and stop it, and they just can't," said Rick Steiner, a former University of Alaska fisheries extension agent whose life was irrevocably upset by the Exxon Valdez, which spilled at least 11 million gallons of oil in Prince William Sound 21 years ago. "Not much oil is going to be recovered; they're not going to save much wildlife; they're not going to be able to restore damaged ecosystems."

The federal damage assessment of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill should take into account the broader economic and social impacts of the 2010 blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Research Council. The group recommended that the federal Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration program consider "ecosystem services" when it calculates the impact of the BP spill, a difficult-to-measure analysis of the services performed by an ecosystem.

With all the hand-wringing regarding Exxon and Valdez, hold on to these facts: Oil is biodegradable, and "this, too, shall pass!" LUCILLE GLASSMAN Westminster

WESTMINSTER, Colo. -- The warning from local health officials dealing with the flooding in Colorado is simple: Don't get in the water. Underscoring that message, state officials have reported a 5,250-gallon oil spill from a flood-damaged tank overtaken by the South Platte River in Weld County, a deluged area northeast of Denver. The tank's owner, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., responded by placing absorbent oil booms in the water. But it's not just oil in the floodwaters that is raising concerns.

The second phase of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill trial begins Monday in New Orleans, restarting a legal juggernaut that could saddle the energy giant with the largest environmental penalty in U.S. history, determine the future health of the Gulf of Mexico and calculate, finally, the amount of crude oil that spewed from the crippled well. The case - which involves a phalanx of federal and state prosecutors, attorneys for several multinational companies, and highly complex engineering testimony - has been droning on with little fanfare since February.

SEATTLE - Six months after federal officials chastised Shell Oil for its faulty offshore drilling operations in the Arctic, the company has yet to explain what safeguards it has put in place or when it plans to resume exploring for oil in the vulnerable region. Shell's 2012 return to offshore Arctic exploration after a generation away was marred by high-profile problems, including hefty fines for polluting the air and a drilling rig that ran aground. The company canceled its 2013 drilling season, and its 2014 operations are in question.

DENVER - When the worst of the flooding began for Weld County last week, Cliff Willmeng, on a hunch, took his 2003 Subaru and drove east. The county's roads and bridges had begun to disintegrate under the might of the historic floodwaters, to the point that Willmeng, an environmental activist, had trouble navigating. Yet what his gut had told him to look for had been, as he put it, "unfortunately easy to find. " What Willmeng saw, and also photographed, was the drowning of Weld County's extensive oil and gas drilling operations - hundreds of fracking wells that were underwater, and an unknown number of storage tanks and other industrial facilities assaulted by the untamed waters.

WESTMINSTER, Colo. -- The warning from local health officials dealing with the flooding in Colorado is simple: Don't get in the water. Underscoring that message, state officials have reported a 5,250-gallon oil spill from a flood-damaged tank overtaken by the South Platte River in Weld County, a deluged area northeast of Denver. The tank's owner, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., responded by placing absorbent oil booms in the water. But it's not just oil in the floodwaters that is raising concerns.

WASHINGTON -- Oil-field services giant Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Halliburton has been charged with one count of destruction of evidence in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. Under a plea agreement that is subject to court approval, Halliburton agreed “to pay the maximum-available statutory fine, to be subject to three years of probation and to continue its cooperation in the government's ongoing criminal investigation,” the Justice Department said.

HOUSTON -- U.S. Coast Guard and federal officials took added measures late Wednesday to control a fire that erupted on a natural gas rig off the coast of Louisiana after a blowout Tuesday. Officials from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the Coast Guard flew over the rig multiple times Wednesday, noting that the derrick and drill floor structure had collapsed over the rig and that natural gas was still flowing. “A very light sheen that dissipates quickly has been observed in the ocean,” the BSEE noted in a statement released late Wednesday.

Federal authorities have approved an oil spill response plan that could allow drilling to commence this summer in the Beaufort Sea, the first major offshore drilling in the Arctic since the early 1990s. Though Shell Alaska still needs several final permits, the oil spill plan has been the most debated aspect of the upcoming drilling program , with fears that cleaning up an offshore blowout in the turbulent, often icy seas of the Arctic could be a formidable challenge.

HOUSTON -- U.S. Coast Guard and firefighting vessels were standing by as officials prepared to stem a natural gas leak and fire that erupted at a well off the Louisiana coast overnight and continued to burn Wednesday following a blowout, authorities said. No one was injured and all 44 workers aboard the rig were evacuated before the fire started at 10:45 p.m. Tuesday, officials said. The rig was still on fire Wednesday and the Coast Guard was restricting vessel traffic within 500 meters of the rig, while also recommending that others stay five miles away, said Lt. j.g. Tanner Stiehl.

When oil sheen appeared on the sea surface last fall not far from the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, authorities wanted to know where it was coming from. Was BP's sealed Macondo well -- the source of the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history -- leaking? Was oil escaping from the 80-ton, steel containment dome abandoned on the gulf floor after it was used in a failed attempt to control the blown-out well? Or was something else the source? Testing revealed that the oil slicks matched the Macondo crude.