Tag: spill

The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez

  • A NOAA scientist surveying an oiled beach to assess the depth of oil penetration soon after the spill (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Twenty years ago this week, an oil tanker ran aground on a rocky reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. It’s considered to be perhaps the biggest ecological disaster in US history. Ann Dornfeld has this look at how oil spill prevention and preparedness have changed in the two decades since Valdez:

Transcript

Twenty years ago this week, an oil tanker ran aground on a rocky reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Exxon Valdez spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. It’s considered to be perhaps the biggest ecological disaster in US history. Ann Dornfeld has this look at how oil spill prevention and preparedness have changed in the two decades since Valdez:

The call came in just after midnight.

“Ah, evidently leaking some oil and we’re gonna be here for a while.”

Court records indicate Captain Joseph Hazelwood was likely drunk when the Exxon Valdez ran aground.

There was hardly any clean-up equipment on hand. No plan for action. The location was remote.

Oil polluted a stretch of Alaskan coastline the length of the entire west coast of the U.S. The oil killed fish, sea otters, harbor seals and an estimated quarter of a million birds. Today, there is still oil on some beaches.

Twenty years later, a cargo vessel has just reported a spill of 160
gallons of oil in Washington state’s Commencement Bay. Investigators
have filled the “Spill Situation Room” in the state Department of Ecology.

“Who’s responsible for actually maintaining
the bow thruster, when was the last time they performed maintenance on it?”

“You mean one of the staff on board?”

“Yeah.”

Spill Response Manager David Byers says coastal states learned a lesson from Exxon Valdez, and developed rapid response systems like this.

“We’ve got crews headed up in a helicopter to do on-
water observations, we’ve got response resources on the water headed out to do containment when we find the location of the oil.”

Byers says the state handles dozens of spills this size each year, making it somewhat of a well-oiled machine.

After the Exxon Valdez, the state of Washington put in place some tough prevention standards. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the state.

The court ruled the state was making safety demands of oil companies that only the federal government could make.

Mike Cooper is Chairman of the state’s Oil Spills Advisory Council. He says that ruling is one reason why small oil spills are common in Washington’s bays. He says other states have come up against the same restrictions.

“When the Massachusetts legislature passed strict laws,
the United States Coast Guard and the industry did the same thing that they did to the people of Washington state. They sued the people of the state of Massachusetts and said, ‘We’ll decide if industry has to pay.'”

The federal Oil Pollution Act did raise industry’s liability and the amount of federal money available in the event of a spill. It also requires oil tankers and barges in U.S. waters to be double-hulled by 2015. The Exxon Valdez’ single hull was easily gouged open when it ran aground.

Today, most U.S.-flagged tankers and barges are double-hulled. Most foreign tankers aren’t yet.

But there’s no law requiring a second hull on cargo ships. Bruce Wishart is Policy Director for People for Puget Sound. He says it’s cargo vessels that are most likely to spill oil.

“It’s commonly assumed that oil tankers pose the
single greatest threat in terms of an oil spill. There are actually many, many more cargo vessels plying our waters that pose a very significant risk simply because they carry a lot of fuel on board.”

In 2007, the cargo vessel Cosco Busan spilled 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay. Thousands of birds died, including endangered species. A fully-loaded cargo ship can contain 40 times more oil than what leaked from the Cosco Busan.

So, while oil tankers have become safer in the two decades since the Exxon Valdez, the nation’s waterways still remain at risk of a major spill.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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Will Coal Ash Spill Get Into the Air?

  • Airborne toxins could be causing health problems for residents near this coal ash spill (seen in the background) in Tennessee. (Photo by Matt Shafer Powell)

Environmentalists don’t want a lot of new coal-burning power plants to be built. They’re concerned about more greenhouse gases from the plants and environmental damage from mining the coal. Late last year, another concern came to light. For decades a power plant disposed of coal ash in a pond next to it. The dam holding back the coal ash sludge failed. Matt Shafer Powell reports more than a billion gallons of the sludge caused plenty of damage to the soil and water. Now, there’s concern about the air:

Transcript

Environmentalists don’t want a lot of new coal-burning power plants to be built. They’re concerned about more greenhouse gases from the plants and environmental damage from mining the coal. Late last year, another concern came to light. For decades a power plant disposed of coal ash in a pond next to it. The dam holding back the coal ash sludge failed. Matt Shafer Powell reports more than a billion gallons of the sludge caused plenty of damage to the soil and water. Now, there’s concern about the air:

In December, the massive coal ash spill at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in East Tennessee made people aware of a hazard they’d never really considered before. And no one knows how much of a problem it’s going to be.

“We’re looking across the Emory River.”

Matt Landon is a volunteer for the environmental group United Mountain Defense. These days, he spends a lot of time near the Tennessee Valley Authority’s ash spill site. His double respirator mask, his personal video camera and his vocal criticism of the T.V.A. have all become fixtures here. It was on one of his recent rounds near the Emory River that he saw something that scared him.

“I drove around the bend here on Emory River Road and I witnessed a massive dust storm coming off the entire coal ash disaster site.”

Landon says the dust cloud was about 70-to-80 feet high and about a half mile wide. Coal ash can contain several toxic heavy metals — like arsenic, lead, and mercury. For Landon, the site of this swirling cloud was a sobering and frightening reminder that it wouldn’t take much for the toxic materials contained in the wet cement-like sludge to dry out and become airborne.

When Landon walks up to Diana Anderson’s house on the Emory River, her shih-tzus go nuts. And no wonder. Here’s this tall, lanky guy in a double-respirator mask headed their way.

Anderson has lived here for forty years now, just downwind from the plant. And she never worried about it. But since the spill, she’s begun to notice changes in her health.

“My sinuses are irritated, I have a raspy throat, and I do a lot of coughing and my head hurts and I feel very, very, very fatigued.”

Anderson has volunteered to let Matt Landon test the air near her home. So, the two head to her kitchen sink, where they wash and prepare Pyrex dishes.

They’ll set the dishes out on Anderson’s back porch to collect dust. After a while, Landon will send the dust samples off to a lab to find out what’s in the air.

The T.V.A. is also testing the air, with help from the state of Tennessee and the E.P.A. T.V.A. Spokesman Gil Francis says they’ve already collected more than 10-thousand air samples.

“We’re taking samples 24/7, the samples are coming back that the air quality is meeting the National Air Ambient Standards and we’re going to continue to work hard to make sure that’s what the case is going forward.”

That might be easier said than done. Francis says the T.V.A. has done a lot to keep the ash from drying out and blowing around. They’ve dropped straw and grass seed from helicopters and coated the ash in an acrylic mixture. But Steven Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy says nobody really knows what it’s going to take to clean this mess up. Or how the people who live downwind will be affected.

“There are still a lot of unknowns about this. We’ve never had an ash spill this size and I think people ought to err on the side of caution.”

If there’s one bit of consolation for the people living near the Kingston coal ash spill, it’s this: the National Weather Service says that during the summer months this region is among the least windy and most humid in the country.

For the Environment Report, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

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The Quicker, Oily Picker-Upper

  • MIT's oil-absorbing mesh towel (Photo courtesy of MIT)

Researchers say they’ve created a special
material that could be used to clean up oil spills
someday. Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

Researchers say they’ve created a special
material that could be used to clean up oil spills
someday. Rebecca Williams has more:

The researchers say it’s sort of a magic paper towel. It looks and feels like
paper. But it’s actually a membrane made out of really tiny wires woven
together.

It repels water completely but soaks up oil.

Francesco Stellacci is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He says the thin membrane can soak up to 20 times its weight in oil.

“We put it on top of a solution that contains both oil and water and the oil gets
absorbed quite readily.”

Stellacci says the material has the potential to help clean up oil spills. But he
says real world conditions are more complicated, so they’ll still need to run
tests outside the lab.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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States Graded on Sewage Spill Alerts

Environmental regulators in the 8-state Great Lakes region are getting mixed grades for their systems to notify the general public about potentially hazardous sewage spills. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Steve Carmody
reports:

Transcript

Environmental regulators in the 8-state Great Lakes region
are getting mixed grades for their systems to notify the general
public about potentially hazardous sewage spills. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Steve Carmody reports:


The Public Interest Research Group in Michigan reviewed each Great Lakes state’s system for reporting sewage spills, and graded its performance.


Study author Mike Shriberg says better public notification systems are needed, especially now, with many people planning boating holidays over the summer.


“Families heading to the beach this summer, families going out on their boats are actually being left in the dark about a major public health risk.”


Michigan topped the list, praised for its coordinated, quick public notification system, though also criticized for some reporting shortfalls.


At the bottom of the list, Ohio received a “D minus” for having no significant statewide system to report sewage spills.


For the GLRC I’m Steve Carmody.


HOST TAG: For more information on the PIRGIM report, go to their website
www.ProtectTheGreatLakes.org

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Report: Sewer Systems Fail to Meet Standards

  • A new report says that sewage systems respond inadequately to sewage spills. (Photo by M. Vasquez)

According to a new report, from an environmental advocacy group, city sewer systems around the Great Lakes are failing to meet federal Clean Water Act standards. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Steve Carmody
reports:

Transcript

According to a new report, from an environmental advocacy group,
city sewer systems around the Great Lakes are failing to meet federal
Clean Water Act standards. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Steve
Carmody reports:


The Environmental Integrity Project analyzed data from federal, state and
other sources to compile its review of municipal waste water systems in the
region.


EIP’s Michelle Merkel says researchers found most municipal waste
water sewage systems failed to meet standards to prevent untreated sewage
spills; failed to adequately report the spills when they occurred; or had
inadequate plans to prevent such spills in the future.


Merkel adds, due to a lack of state and federal oversight, the problem may
actually be worse:


“The true extent of the problem is really unknown because the states just aren’t doing a good job of tracking it and making the cities track it.”


To address the problem, The EIP wants the EPA and state regulators to
enforce combined sewer overflow rules, require public notification of spills
within 24 hours and arrange for more federal-state financing for future
sewer improvement projects.


For the GLRC, I’m Steve Carmody.

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Breaking Down Groundwater Pollution

  • While the idea of cleaning up the water with bacteria may be oxymoronic, Michigan State University is saying that it works. (Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation)

Scientists in the Great Lakes region are seeing good results from a new method that fights groundwater pollution. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner has more:

Transcript

Scientists in the Great Lakes region are seeing good results from a new method that fights groundwater pollution. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Erin Toner has more:


Researchers at Michigan State University are using a process that introduces microbial bacteria into contaminated aquifers. Over time, the microbes break down hazardous waste, usually from industrial spills. Before this new technology, the most common cleanup technique was called “air stripping.” That requires groundwater to be pumped to the surface, where toxic chemicals are basically blown out of the water and into the air.


Professor Mike Dybas says the new process doesn’t leave pollution in the ecosystem.


“It’s treatment actually occurring where the pollution is, and it is physically destructive of the contaminant. So at the end of the day, the contaminants are broken down into harmless end products.”


Dybas says the process could be used in any type of industrial or agricultural spill. He says since the microbes move with the water, cleanup could stretch for miles underground.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Erin Toner.

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The Fate of Slant Drilling

Far below the bottom of the Great Lakes, valuable pockets of oil and
gas sit waiting to be tapped. But laws prohibit offshore drilling. So
for the last twenty years, oil companies have been using another method
to get to the deposits; it’s called directional or slant-drilling. Up
until this point, there hasn’t been much opposition. But now a number
of bills are pending that could change oil and gas development beneath
the lakes. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports: