Oil Spill

We may well be living with the consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the rest of the 21st century. But judging by past environmental disasters, the spill also has the potential to reinvigorate the environmental movement going forward. For more than a century, ecological crises have often strengthened environmental movements. Take the fight over preserving the scenic Hetch Hetchy Valley just outside Yosemite National Park. The biggest environmental battle of naturalist John Muir's life was one that he lost — the fight to keep the city of San Francisco from erecting a dam on the Tuolumne River and flooding Hetch Hetchy.

The massive civil lawsuit stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, originally scheduled to go to trial Monday in New Orleans, has been postponed for one week to give oil giant BP and lawyers for more than 120,000 plaintiffs time to continue settlement talks. The postponement of the start of the trial to March 5 was announced in a joint statement Sunday from BP, which was in charge of the drilling project, and the group of plaintiffs' attorneys known as the Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, or PSC. "BP and the PSC are working to reach agreement to fairly compensate people and businesses affected by the Deepwater Horizon accident and oil spill," the statement read.

Transocean Deepwater Inc., an oil drilling company, formally pleaded guilty on Thursday to a misdemeanor charge and will pay $400 million in criminal penalties, the latest action in the 2010 Gulf oil spill. U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo in New Orleans accepted the guilty plea to violating the Clean Water Act plea and imposed sentence, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Transocean agreed last month to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge and to pay $1 billion in civil penalties along with the criminal penalty.

SEATTLE--The vessel designated to act as a crucial oil spill containment system in Arctic waters has obtained Coast Guard  approval to meet less rigorous weather standards than originally proposed. But, less than two weeks before drilling off Alaska's northern coast is due to begin, a series of troubling construction delays have left the Arctic Challenger without federal certification . The certification issue is the most serious Shell must confront if it is to successfully launch a exploratory drilling program, the first in Arctic waters in two decades, in which it already has invested $4 billion.

At least 21 vessels were backed up along the Mississippi River as authorities worked on Monday to clean up an oil spill from a barge that hit a railroad bridge near Vicksburg, Miss. Officials have placed more than 2,500 feet of boom to contain the spill, Petty Officer Jonathan Lally told the Los Angeles Times by telephone. There was no estimate when the spill will be completely cleaned up, he said. At most, the spill could reach 80,000 gallons of crude oil from one of the damaged barges in Sunday's accident, Lally said.

New research suggests that oil and gas belching from BP's blown-out well during the Deepwater Horizon disaster disappeared more quickly than expected because of the northern Gulf of Mexico's geography. The deep-sea blowout, which produced the largest offshore spill in the nation's history, occurred off the coast of Louisiana in a portion of the gulf that is almost enclosed on three sides. That influenced water movement in a way that boosted bacterial consumption of the leaking oil and methane gas, according to a study that will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “When the hydrocarbons were released from the well, bacteria bloomed,” said the paper's lead author, UC Santa Barbara geochemist David Valentine.  “In other locations, those blooms would be swept away by prevailing ocean currents, but in the Gulf of Mexico, they swirled around at great depths like a washing machine, and often circled back over the leaking well, sometimes two or three times.” That meant more munching by oil-loving microbes near the wellhead.

Anne Rheams saw them this week floating in the water, small and scattered and about the size of silver dollars. Some had washed up near boat docks, others near lakeside subdivisions — tar balls, most likely from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They made their way to Lake Pontchartrain, the vast estuarine oval that hems New Orleans to the north — and defines the city's character and destiny as much as the winding Mississippi River a few miles south. By Tuesday, cleanup crews had collected more than 1,020 pounds of tar balls and waste from the lake and the Rigolets, the strait connecting Pontchartrain to Lake Borgne and the Gulf of Mexico.

A federal judge in New Orleans accepted an agreement for BP to plead guilty to manslaughter and other charges and pay a record fine in connection with the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which ranks as one of the nation's worst environmental disasters. The agreement , announced in November, allowed a unit of the London-based oil giant to plead guilty Tuesday to 11 counts of seaman's manslaughter in connection with the explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the gulf.

The July 2010 oil spill near Marshall, Mich., though little-known by the public, was widely considered one of the worst inland oil spills in U.S. history. Now, the National Transportation Safety Board has released the results of a two-year investigation into the spill -- and Enbridge Energy Partners takes it on the chin. For starters, NTSB investigators said, Enbridge knew that its pipeline had been damaged five years before the spill. When the spill actually occurred, investigators said, the company's response was, in short, "poor.