"Exxon cleans up 4 Mont. spill sites" July 23, 2011|Associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. - ExxonMobil Pipeline Co. crews have finished initial cleanup work on four sites contaminated when a pipeline carrying crude oil broke underneath the Yellowstone River three weeks ago.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Quality will assess whether the cleanup is adequate....
Related: Slow Saturday Special: EPA and Exxon Unite
So far, 46 sites have been identified for cleanup after about 1,000 barrels of oil leaked into the river, starting on July 1.
Exxon brought in International Bird Rescue of California to clean wildlife affected by the spill. Jay Holcomb with the rescue group says they have only had to treat three birds.
It's almost as if there never was an "accident."
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Good thing EPA is on the job, huh?
"EPA says it knew about asbestos in wood chips" July 19, 2011|Associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. - Federal regulators knew potentially contaminated bark and wood chips were being sold from a Superfund site in the asbestos-tainted town of Libby, Mont., for three years before they stopped the practice, according to a letter from the Environmental Protection Agency to Senator Max Baucus.
The Democrat asked for an investigation into the contaminated scrap piles at a defunct timber mill in response to an Associated Press story that detailed how the wood chips and bark had been widely used as landscaping material by residents and government officials.
Oh, the irony of the wood chips in government lawns. Say no to biomass, too!
Asbestos from a W.R. Grace mine in Libby has killed an estimated 400 people.
The EPA previously said it learned last fall that the wood chips and bark stockpiled at the former Stimson Lumber mill were being sold by a local economic development official. But in the July 14 letter to Baucus, the agency acknowledges it knew of the sales since at least October 2007.
The EPA found asbestos in samples it took from the piles in 2007 but never quantified how much.
The agency is now trying to gauge the health risk. Results from additional testing are expected this summer.
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Yup, good thing there is an EPA:
"BP adopts new safety standards for Gulf drilling" July 15, 2011|Harry R. Weber, Associated Press
A year after it capped its out-of-control well in the Gulf of Mexico, oil giant BP PLC said Friday it is taking new steps to improve the reliability of the cement used to seal its wells and the fail-safe devices used to prevent blowouts.
The fish are still oil- and dispersant-soaked, and there is muck at the bottom, but other than that....
The U.S. government welcomed the voluntary measures announced by the British firm — which seemed to target shortcomings addressed in several investigations of the disaster — but also noted that it has already established what it believes are strong safety and environmental standards that all operators are required to meet in order to operate in deep waters.
Eleven men were killed when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded off Louisiana on April 20, 2010, leading to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The well was capped on July 15, 2010, and permanently sealed from the bottom two months after that. The government estimates that some 206 million gallons of oil were released by BP’s Macondo well a mile beneath the sea. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent or committed by BP on cleaning up the devastation and compensating victims....
But industry experts have said that despite the extra measures taken by government and industry since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, they believe another disaster could happen again.
They have noted that the effectiveness of the much-touted containment system has been questioned, and a design flaw in the blowout preventers widely used across the industry has been identified but not corrected.
In Washington, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said that if BP can adopt voluntary safety standards that go above what is required by regulators, the rest of the oil and gas industry can, too.
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