'Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of

What could possibly go wrong when miners, frackers, and drillers reshape the geology beneath our feet? Talk to the evacuees of Bayou Corne, Louisiana.

One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne's 350 residents—an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.

Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing disaster in the United States you haven't heard of.
What happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out—a mine dubbed Oxy3—collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep.

It subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it occasionally swallows whole.

It celebrated its first birthday recently, and like most one-year-olds, it is both growing and prone to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to the community.

LINK (via: Mother Jones)

U.S. to Ban New Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon

Score one for the good guys.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is expected to announce on Monday that he has approved a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mining claims in a million-acre buffer zone around the Grand Canyon.

LINK (Via: The New York Times)

Dropping the Gloves to Fight for a River

Willie Mitchell, a rugged defenseman for the Los Angeles Kings and a former Vancouver Canuck, is dropping his gloves to fight for a river he has loved since he was a boy.

“The Kokish is close to my heart,” he said of the river on northern Vancouver Island where a proposed independent power project would divert a substantial amount of the water into a pipe to generate hydroelectricity.

LINK (Via: The Globe and Mail)

Protecting Olympic Penninsula Rivers and Wildlands

Some good news from the homefront regarding the Olympic Penninsula.

U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., are out with a draft plan that would designate 130,000 acres of additional wilderness in federal forest lands on the Olympic Peninsula.

The proposal would also put 23 rivers – including such well-known streams as the Elwha, Sol Duc, Hoh and Bogachiel rivers – into the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

LINK (Via: The Seattle PI)

Investigation finds more problem oil pipelines crossing Montana Rivers

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

State officials Tuesday heard the results of a federal inspection into Montana’s oil pipeline river crossings. The inspection finds safety concerns on waterways across the state.

LINK (Via: Dan Boyce)