PORT VILA – Het land Vanuatu in het zuiden van de Grote Oceaan is donderdag getroffen door een aardbeving. Het Pacifische Tsunamiwaarschuwingscentrum vaardigde een alarm uit, maar trok dat enige tijd later in.

Er is voor zover bekend geen tsunami geweest. Er zijn ook geen meldingen over schade of slachtoffers na de aardbeving.

De beving had een kracht van ongeveer 7.2 op de schaal van Richter, aldus de Amerikaanse geologische dienst USGS. Het epicentrum lag op een diepte van ongeveer 36 kilometer.

Bron: Nu.nl

Op de seismische monitor IRIS is te zien dat na de beving nog drie opeenvolgende bevingen volgden van respectievelijk 5.7, 5.2 en 6.4 op de schaal van Richter.

Asregen na vulkaanuitbarsting Guatemala

GUATEMALA-STAD – Bij een zeer krachtige uitbarsting van de vulkaan Pacaya in Guatemala is donderdag een grote hoeveelheid as uitgestoten. Ten minste vier mensen worden vermist. Het gaat om drie kinderen van zeven tot tien jaar oud en een lokale verslaggever. Dat heeft de regering vrijdag laten weten.

De journalist zou getroffen zijn door een rots die door de vulkaan werd uitgespuwd. Zijn cameraman is gaan rennen om hulp te halen, maar door de almaar as en stenen spuwende vulkaan konden hulpdiensten geen reddingsactie ondernemen.

Het vliegverkeer van en naar Guatemala-Stad is stilgelegd en de scholen blijven dicht, aldus Guatemalteekse media.

Ongeveer 1750 bewoners van dorpen rond de meer dan 2500 meter hoge vulkaan worden door het leger geëvacueerd. De in het gebied aanwezige toeristen zijn volgens de Guatemalteekse autoriteiten inmiddels in veiligheid gebracht. Volgens het Insivumeh, het instituut dat onder andere vulkanische activiteit in de gaten houdt, spuwt de Pacaya sinds donderdagavond stenen en as uit. Boven de vulkaan heeft zich een kolom as van ruim 1,5 kilometer hoogte gevormd.

De Pacaya, die zo’n 30 kilometer ten zuiden van Guatemala-Stad ligt, is een van de meest actieve vulkanen van Latijns-Amerika. Sinds 1965 is de vulkaan vrijwel continu actief en is een populaire attractie onder toeristen. De laatste uitbarsting van deze omvang was in 1998.

Bron: Telegraaf.nl

by Greg Palast for Buzzflash.com Friday, May 28 2010

With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there’s no space in the press for British Petroleum’s latest spill, just this week: over 100,000 gallons, at its Alaska pipeline operation. A hundred thousand used to be a lot. Still is.

On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after “procedures weren’t properly implemented” by BP operators, say state inspectors “Procedures weren’t properly implemented” is, it seems, BP’s company motto.

Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.

There’s another reason to keep their name off the Pipe: their management of the pipe stinks. It’s corroded, it’s undermanned and “basic maintenance” is a term

BP never heard of.

How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it: bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”

This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe’s Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Dan Lawn, Alaska state pipeline inspector who challenged BP. photo: J. Macalpine 1997 (Palast Fund)

Two decades ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum’s management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan Natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, a courageous, steel-eyed government inspector, Dan Lawn, was hollering about corrosion all through the BP pipeline. I say “courageous” because Lawn kept his job only because his union’s lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

It wasn’t until 2006, 17 years later, that BP claimed to have suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shut-down of the line.

It was pretty darn hard for BP to claim surprise in August 2006 that corrosion required shutting the pipeline. Five months earlier, Inspector Lawn had written his umpteenth warning when he identified corrosion as the cause of a big leak .

BP should have known about the problem years before that … if only because they had taped Dan Lawn’s home phone calls.

BP: Red, White and Bush

I don’t want readers to think BP is a foreign marauder unconcerned about America.

The company is deeply involved in our democracy. Bob Malone, until last year the Chairman of BP America, was also Alaska State Co-Chairman of the Bush re-election campaign. Mr. Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP’s care of Alaska’s environment that he pushed again to open the state’s arctic wildlife refuge (ANWR) to drilling by the BP consortium.

You can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP’s care of the wilderness. You can smell it: the crude oil is still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because they were dumb enough to have the company’s name on the ship. But it was BP’s pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island. However, the reports were bogus, the equipment wasn’t there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volumes worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, we know BP cares about nature because they have lots of photos of solar panels in their annual reports – and they’ve painted every one of their gas stations green.

The green paint-job is supposed to represent the oil giant’s love of Mother Nature. But CEO Tony Hayward knows it stands for the color of the Yankee dollar.

In 2006, BP finally discovered the dangerous corrosion in the pipeline after running a “smart pig” through it. The “pig” is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though they had not done so for 14 years. Another “procedure not properly implemented.”

By not properly inspecting the pipeline for over a decade, BP failed to prevent that March 2006 spill which polluted Prudhoe Bay. And cheaping out on remote controls for their oil well blow-out preventers appears to have cost the lives of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon.

But then, failure to implement proper safety procedures has saved BP, not millions but billions of dollars, suggests that the company’s pig is indeed, very, very smart.

President Obama staat deze week in zijn wekelijkse videoboodschap stil bij het olielek in de Golf van Mexico. De president stelt een onafhankelijke commissie in die moet onderzoeken wat er precies mis is gegaan, en hoe dit in de toekomst voorkomen kan worden.

De president zei dit in zijn wekelijkse YouTube-boodschap, die je iedere zondagmorgen op amerika.blog.nl ziet.

Een waarschijnlijke – en door president Obama al geopperde – uitkomst van het onderzoek is strenger toezicht op oliemaatschappijen.

Na kritiek dat het Witte Huis te traag reageerde nadat bekend werd dat het olieplatform van BP geëxplodeerd was laat president Obama nu geen kans onbenut om uiteen te zetten hoe hard hij aan een oplossing werkt:

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

Saturday, 22 May 2010 – Desperate times call for desperate measures. So with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, and its corporate image starting to resemble the tar-covered sea creatures now washing on to Louisiana’s fragile shoreline, BP has called on Kevin Costner to help stave off environmental Armageddon.

The Hollywood star has been bobbing around the Mississippi Delta helping representatives of the British oil firm and US coastguard test-drive a stainless steel device called the Ocean Therapy. In a claim which sounds as unlikely as the plot premise of Waterworld, he says it can quickly and efficiently clean oil from tainted sea water.

Bizarrely, Costner may be on to something. The actor has spent 15 years and roughly $26m (£18m) of his personal fortune developing the patented machine with the help of his elder brother Dan, a scientist. It works like a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking up dirty liquid and then using a high-speed centrifuge to separate it into oil, and heavier water.

When he allowed the local media to see Ocean Therapy in action – albeit on dry land – it appeared to work as advertised. Yesterday, six of the devices were attached to boats and floated into the Gulf, so the organisers of the clean-up operation could see whether they might also be capable of functioning on the high seas.

“This is a technology that we know works, and has worked for a long time,” Costner said, adding that 26 of the machines are now in Louisiana ready to be put into action. “I’m just really happy that the light of day has come to this, and I’m very sad about why it is. But this is why it was developed, and like anything that we all face, as a group, we face it together.”

Read the complete story

OSLO – In de Noordzee voor de Noorse kust is een Noors olie- en gaswinningsplatform deels ontruimd na een ernstig incident. Een van de twee veiligheidsmechanismen tegen explosies liet het afweten, zo maakte het Noorse energieconcern Statoil vrijdag bekend. Bij het boorgat werd een onregelmatige druk vastgesteld.

Volgens Statoil is er geen lek. De maatschappij zei bezig te zijn de situatie te “normaliseren”� nadat het probleem donderdag was opgetreden. Bijna negentig medewerkers op het platform werden in veiligheid gebracht.

De milieubeschermingsorganisatie Bellona maakt zich grote zorgen. Door een ongecontroleerde druk kunnen zware ongelukken gebeuren, aldus de voorzitter.

Bron: Telegraaf.nl