The Gulf Disaster One Year Later

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Some of the top stories around the web on the anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon:

The Times-Picayune remembers the 11 men whose lives were lost at sea.

The Center for Public Integrity has an excellent piece today about BP’s public relations work on the Gulf, focusing on one woman in particular who became the company’s friendly face for community outreach. Turns out she has history of playing the public on BP’s behalf.

Scientific American has a piece looking at the long-term impact for wildlife in the Gulf, concluding that there are still more questions than answers when it comes to the health of the ecosystem.

The NAACP published a report today, “My Name is 6508799,” which details the economic and health impacts for Gulf coast residents, many of them minorities, in the past year.

Over at Grist, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) weighs in on what has changed in terms of drilling safety in the past year. His conclusion: Not a damn thing.

More than 3,200 oil and gas wells are still unplugged in the Gulf, threatening the same waters besieged by the 4.9-million barrel spill last year, the Associated Press reports today. The wells are still classified as “active,” even though they haven’t been tapped for five years and no one plans to come back to them anytime soon.

The New York Times has a nice short profile of Michael Bromwich, the guy tapped to head the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in the wake of the spill.

National Geographic looks at six things that experts got wrong about the spill.

On Tuesday, the federal government reopened the last of the Gulf waters closed to fishing during the spill.

 

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