TV News LIES

Attorney General Pam Bondi has filed a lawsuit against oil company BP and Halliburton over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Bondi filed on Saturday on the three-year anniversary of the tragedy that killed 11 rig workers in the Gulf of Mexico and fouled 1,100 miles of beaches and marsh along the Gulf coast.

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A Pennsylvania judge in the heart of the Keystone State’s fracking belt has issued a forceful and precedent-setting decision holding that there is no corporate right to privacy under that state’s constitution, giving citizens and journalists a powerful tool to understand the health and environmental impacts of natural gas drilling in their communities.

“Whether a right of privacy for businesses exists within the prenumbral rights of Pennsylvania’s constitution is a matter of first impression,” wrote Washington County Court of Common Pleas Judge Debbie O’Dell Seneca late last month. “It does not.”

Two U.S. scientists say it's not a question of "if" there will be nearly ice-free summers in the arctic but "when," and sooner than many think.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientists James Overland and Muyin Wang say several different methods for predicting when the arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer show it could happen before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two.

The incident in Mayflower, 25 miles north of Little Rock, pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude spilled from an Exxon oil tanker into Alaskan waters. It's too early to estimate the financial cost from Mayflower to Exxon, but it is likely to be a drop in the bucket for the $400 billion company.

But the spill has stoked a national debate about the safety of carrying crude in pipelines across the United States just as politicians weigh whether to approve the mega Keystone XL pipeline that will help to link the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, with oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

And although significant pipeline spills happen every three days on average in the United States, according to federal data, rarely do they occur in a town and rarely in these volumes.

UPDATE: Correction: We originally reported that Exxon had allegedly pumped diluted bitumen which spilled into the Northwood Subdivision into a nearby wetland. We were mistaken; they power washed it into the nearby wetland via storm drains.

Mayflower, AR, April 5: We spent most of the day chasing down reports of oil sightings and talking to residents.

Water contaminated with radioactive material that leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan may have seeped into groundwater, officials said Saturday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, said 120 tons of water leaked early Saturday as workers transferred it from a leaking tank to another one, The Asahi Shimbun reported. Company officials said none of the tainted water has gotten into the ocean.

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While clean up continues at the site of the Exxon oil pipeline spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, yesterday, an estimated 700 barrels of oil (or almost 30,000 gallons) were found to have leaked from the Shell oil West Colombia pipeline in Houston. The US Coast Guard reports that about 50 barrels worth of crude oil spilled into a bayou.

TVNL Comment: Note that this is a 'very early estimate.'

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Benzene levels as much as 800 times more than the federal drinking water standard have been found in shallow groundwater in a monitoring well just 10 feet from the banks of Parachute Creek at the site of a liquid hydrocarbon leak.

However, Todd Hartman, spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources, said Tuesday testing of the creek water continues to show no signs of contamination from the leak.
Sampling results from the newly completed well shows benzene levels of 1,900 to 4,100 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum allowable level for benzene, a carcinogen, in drinking water is 5 ppb.