Tag: shutoff

Gulf Oil Spill and Hurricane Season

  • Hurricane Rita in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Schmaltz, NASA/GSFC )

Hurricane season starts soon. Experts predict an active season with four “major” hurricanes. What happens if a storm hits while there’s still an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Tanya Ott reports.

Transcript

Hurricane season starts soon. Experts predict an active season with four “major” hurricanes. What happens if a storm hits while there’s still an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Tanya Ott reports.

If a tropical storm hits while there’s still oil in the water, it could disastrous for the coastline and several miles inland. Mark Wysocki is a Cornell University climatologist.

“All that oil would get into the marshlands and some of the homeowners’ properties and so forth and that would make it very difficult then to remove that oil from those types of locations.”

When Katrina hit Louisiana it destroyed some of the oil distributor piping, and they’re still cleaning up in some of the wetland areas.

Wysocki says the one upside is that oil makes it harder for water to evaporate. Tropical storms need evaporation to build strength. So an oil spill might actually keep storms smaller.

For The Environment Report, I”m Tanya Ott.

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Congress Investigates Gulf Oil Spill

  • One area the investigation will focus on is whether the blowout prevention and emergency shutoff devices had been tested and properly maintained for use at the drilling facility.(Photo courtesy of the US Mineral Management Service)

Next week Congress will hold what’s likely to be the first of many hearings on the drilling rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Lester Graham reports this is just the latest Congressional investigation into BP’s operations.

Transcript

Next week Congress will hold what’s likely to be the first of many hearings on the drilling rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Lester Graham reports this is just the latest Congressional investigation into BP’s operations.

Congressman Bart Stupak chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He says you can add this oil spill in the Gulf to several oil spills on Alaska’s North Slope and the refinery explosion that killed 15 people in Texas City in 2005. He says earlier this year he fired off a letter about billions of dollars in budget cuts BP just recently made.

“We wanted to make sure these cuts don’t negatively affect the safety of the workers or the environment. I mean, we put that in writing to them in January. And when I heard about the blow-out and the fire down there and the accident, they didn’t have to tell me the company that was bitten by this. I just figured it was BP.”

Stupak’s subcommittee will be questioning BP officials, the drilling rig operators, TransOcean, and Halliburton which did maintenance work on the rig.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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