A former BP employee who helped form BP’s oil-spill cleanup response in Mississippi is suing the oil giant, alleging his bosses terminated him after he complained to them about how the company was handling cleanup efforts.
The Troy, Alabama, city council voted recently to allow the city to pursue a claim against BP for revenues lost during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and in its aftermath. The disastrous oil spill erupted less about 50 miles south of Louisiana in April 2010, flooding the Gulf of Mexico with crude oil just before peak tourism and fishing seasons began.
Mobile Press-Register reporters went to Alabama’s Dauphin Island Monday looking for tar balls deposited on the beaches by BP’s Gulf oil spill, but they found the most telling signs that all is not right in the Gulf in a number of fish pulled from the surf with “bloody red lesions.”
Monday night’s BCS National Championship showdown between the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University, broadcast nationwide from the Superdome in New Orleans, provided a tantalizing opportunity for BP to release what the Associated Press aptly called a “slick nationwide public relations campaign to persuade Americans that the Gulf region has recovered.”
Shrimp season ended in the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday night, bringing a close to possibly the worst season for catching white shrimp in many years. Officials probing the possible causes of this season’s disastrous shrimp yield say it’s too early to tell whether BP’s record-shattering Gulf oil spill is to blame for the disastrous shrimp yield.
Not long after the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, people in the coastal areas of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida began complaining of respiratory irritation, headaches, dizziness, and other symptoms they believe were linked to the noxious fumes of the BP oil spill. Now a new government report about the pollution emitted from the spill and the attempts to clean it up may support such claims.
BP has reached a settlement with Cameron International, another one of its contractors involved in the Macondo well operations that ended in a deadly explosion and set off the catastrophic Gulf oil spill. BP sued Cameron and other companies involved in the Deepwater Horizon‘s drilling operations, claiming each played a role in the April 2010 explosion that killed 11 workers and set off the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.
BP and federal authorities have denied the blown-out Macondo well may still be leaking, even as miles-long slicks of fresh oil continue to blanket areas of the Gulf near the site occupied by the Deepwater Horizon before it exploded in April 2010. In the fall, a number of flyovers thoroughly documented the new spill, and samples of crude collected by investigative reporters from the site were sent to Louisiana State University for analysis. Scientists there confirmed those samples as a “dead ringer” for the Macondo well oil. Still, even as several large ships contracted by BP lingered near the Macondo well site, neither BP nor the federal government offered answers that could satisfactorily explain the size and volume of all these new oil slicks.
A group of Gulf Coast officials went to Washington this week to urge passage of the RESTORE Act, a piece of legislation designed to ensure that 80 percent of the oil-spill fine money BP pays to the federal government would go to the states directly affected by the disaster: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
NEW ORLEANS, LA — Oil giant BP is doing everything it can to sew its pockets and recover the billions of dollars it lost in the wake of its disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but things don’t always go its way. This week, despite BP’s best efforts to steer court opinion in a direction favorable to its future interests and liability, the oil giant lost two major rulings.
