Disasters

Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate as a wildfire near Boulder, Colorado, rages on.

"BP wants the federal government to meet its demand for continued access to oil and gas leases in the United States. If the oil giant can't keep drilling here, its promise to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon disaster might go unfulfilled—or so the company claims."

"In May, the company pledged $500 million for critical oil spill science. Then politics and parochialism got in the way."

"Oxygen levels fell significantly in deep-sea areas of the Gulf of Mexico contaminated by oil plumes from the BP spill. But although researchers found a 20% decline in dissolved oxygen, the drop was not steep enough to create biological 'dead zones' that some scientists feared might form in the wake of the BP disaster." Those were the findings of a government study.

"He'd just met her, but Evan Beedle wanted Rosina Philippe to know how his life changed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, how pieces of his identity slipped away, one label at a time. Husband. Father. Fisherman."

"An oil and natural gas production platform exploded  in flames Thursday morning, sending 13 workers on board plunging into the Gulf of Mexico and touching raw nerves about the safety of offshore energy operations in the wake of the BP spill. But none of the 13 workers sustained serious injury, and by the end of the day Thursday, it appeared catastrophe had been averted and that early comparisons to BP's April 20 disaster were unjustified."

"Hurricane Earl  pounded the Outer Banks with heavy rains and strong winds early Friday morning as the eye of the storm passed around 90 miles off the coast. Early signs suggested the ocean surge was not as severe as predicted, but residents awaited full daylight to assess the damage."

People who live on the Gulf beaches of Alabama say that winds from the South are bringing in an oil sea mist that coats metal objects, sunglasses, and people's hair. Not trusting the government or BP to investigate it scientifically, they are hiring their own independent scientists.

"BP significantly increased its spending on advertising after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. BP spent $93.4 million on newspaper, magazine, television and Internet advertising in the three months after the disaster, three times what it spent in the comparable period in 2009, the company reported to Congress."
 

"James J. Lee divided the world into good and bad. According to his writings on a Web site he created, people were bad, especially 'parasitic' babies."