Tag: evaporate

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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Spill-Proof Gas Cans Could Reduce Pollution

State governments are beginning to look at a pollution source in your garage that usually goes unnoticed. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

State governments are beginning to look at a pollution source in your garage that usually goes unnoticed. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


That old red gasoline can you use to fill your lawn mower could be polluting more than your car. New York is the first Great Lakes state to consider requiring manufacturers of the cans to come up with spill-proof cans that don’t allow gasoline to evaporate. California already has such a law. Richard Varenchik is with the California Air Resources Board.


“Frequently when you fill it up at the gas station, you spill some gas. When you pour gas into your lawn mower or chain saw, you spill some gas. Frequently you lose the cap to the can and so it sits in your garage and sort of evaporates gasoline into the air.”


Some estimates indicate we as a nation spill a tanker ship’s worth of gasoline each year. Newly designed cans eliminate most of the spill risk and evaporation, but they cost as much as six dollars more.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.