Disasters

"When the massive tsunami smacked into Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear power plant was stacked high with more uranium than it was originally designed to hold and had repeatedly missed mandatory safety checks over the past decade. The Fukushima plant that has spun into partial meltdown and spewed out plumes of radiation had become a growing depot for spent fuel in a way the American engineers who designed the reactors 50 years earlier had never envisioned, according to company documents and outside experts."

"An offshore rig exploring possible oil and gas fields off Nigeria's coast for Chevron caught fire Monday, and the oil company said officials were still trying to account for all those working there."

"Chevron said two workers were missing and 152 others found, but gave no further detail on the missing persons.

The company said it was still investigating the fire, which occurred near its North Apoi oil platform, and which forced it to shut down."
     

"The Palisades nuclear power plant, which sits on the shores of Lake Michigan, could soon be downgraded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to a status making it among the nation's five worst-performing nuclear plants after a year of accidents, unexpected shutdowns and safety violations."

"TOKYO — A powerful and independent panel of specialists appointed by Japan’s Parliament is challenging the government’s account of the accident at a Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and will start its own investigation into the disaster — including an inquiry into how much the March earthquake may have damaged the plant’s reactors even before the tsunami. "

"The fate of the Costa Concordia cruise liner highlights the wider impact of the cruise industry."

"OTTAWA — Subsidiaries of the company that wants to build the Gateway pipeline through northern B.C. have reported more than 170 pipeline leaks and spills in the United States since 2002, accident reporting data show."

Two years after the earthquake in Haiti that took at least 250,000 lives and left many camping in the open, the outpouring of several billion dollars in aid from charitable organizations has done little to rebuild the country.

Marjorie Valbrun reports for iWatch News (Center for Public Integrity) January 10, 2012.

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"DAUPHIN ISLAND, Alabama -- More than half the fish caught Monday by Press-Register reporters in the surf off Dauphin Island had bloody red lesions on their bodies.

Fishing along an uninhabited portion of the barrier island during a trip to survey beaches for tarballs, the newspaper caught 21 fish, 14 of them with lesions. Of those fish, eight had lesions a quarter of an inch across or smaller, while 6 had much larger blemishes.

Most of the fish were whiting, a small species common to the surf zone throughout the Gulf of Mexico. ...

"MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s social development secretary says an estimated 600,000 households suffered property damage or crop losses due to an unusual combination of floods, drought and freezing weather in 2011. Heriberto Felix Guerra says the drought has been so bad that about 2.6 million people in about 1,650 villages and towns in northern Mexico do not even have drinking water."

"After the March 11 tsunami slammed into the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant and wrecked three reactors, many people expected the nation's cutting-edge robotic technologies to come to the rescue.

That, however, turned out to be wishful thinking, and the public was left wondering why Japanese robots, such as Honda Motor Co.'s Asimo humanoid, weren't sent to the power plant to assist firefighters and workers trying to bring the crippled reactors under control.