The South Coast Air Quality Management District filed an $183,114,000 lawsuit against BP West Coast Products today for thousands of air quality violations at the company’s Carson refinery.

Today’s lawsuit is the sequel to a civil action filed by AQMD against BP in 2003 seeking $413,985,000 for thousands of similar air quality violations. That lawsuit, representing the largest penalty ever sought by AQMD, is still ongoing. Combined, the two lawsuits seek more than $597 million.

“Emissions from the Carson refinery have significantly impacted its neighbors, including school children, and posed a very serious air pollution problem,” said Barry Wallerstein, AQMD’s executive officer.

The new civil suit, filed in the Central District of Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges that BP illegally released air pollutants by failing to adequately inspect, maintain, repair and properly operate thousands of pieces of equipment across the refinery as required by AQMD regulations. In some cases, the violations were due to negligence, while in others the violations were knowingly and willfully committed by refinery officials, the lawsuit alleges.

Although the suit seeks a minimum civil penalty of $183 million, BP’s potential liability could be even more substantial.

The suit is based on violations issued by AQMD to BP between August 2002 and early October 2004. The complaint cites violations associated with the refinery’s storage tanks, valves, wastewater and ’sour water’ systems, flares and other equipment dating as far back as 1991, including:

• Failure to properly maintain more than three dozen petroleum storage tanks and floating roofs on tanks, allowing excess emissions of smog-forming volatile organic compounds (VOC);
• Failure to account for and properly inspect approximately 140,000 refinery components, resulting in excess VOC emissions;
• Failure to adequately maintain an industrial wastewater system, resulting in excess emissions;
• Failure to properly operate the refinery’s ’sour water’ and vapor recovery systems, resulting in more than 125 illegal releases of odors and particulates; and
• Numerous violations associated with the refinery’s flares, including tampering with flare monitoring equipment, dramatically reducing the number of air pollution samples taken from flares; and making false statements to AQMD regarding flares.

“We hope this lawsuit will send a strong message to the company and other polluters in the Southland, that endangering public health from illegal air pollution violations will not be tolerated.”

AQMD is the air pollution control agency for Orange County and major portions of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Original press release: AQMD Files $183 Million Lawsuit Against BP For Air Pollution Violations (AQMD)

The amount of fresh water entering the Arctic Ocean from the rivers that feed it is increasing, UK scientists report.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they say the increase is caused in part by human activities and is an early sign of climate change.

Complete article: Arctic rivers ‘flowing faster’ (BBC News)

Kobe, 19 January 2005 - Japan’s response to its deadliest storm in 25 years provides an excellent opportunity for the world community to draw lessons in disaster preparedness, says a new report launched here today at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe.

The report on the Tokage typhoon that swept across much of southern Japan on 20 October last year shows that while the human impacts were heavy, extensive damage was avoided due to the good practices put in place at all levels of Japanese society.

It says, the package of measures related to governance, education and awareness, information and data management, and related procedures collectively helped in mitigating the negative impacts of the disaster.

“Japan has been in the forefront of sound practices in minimizing the destructive impacts of disasters,” said Klaus Toepfer, UNEP Executive Director. “This UNEP study on the Tokage typhoon will provide valuable lessons for mitigation and management in other countries facing similar disasters.”

“The report also reinforces the importance of environmental concerns in the entire disaster management cycle of prevention, preparedness, assessment, mitigation and response and to integrate environmental concerns into planning for relief, rehabilitation, reconstruction and development,” he said.

On 20 October 2004, the Tokage typhoon swept through and ravaged much of the southern half of Japan. People were overcome by the massive waves and flash floods triggered by the typhoon’s heavy rains and strong winds, which left at least 93 people dead. At its height, Tokage, packing winds of up to 144km/h, had an 800km radius, and set off more than 700 landslides.

In Toyo-oka city, the hardest hit place, residences, infrastructure, forests and agricultural lands were severely damaged. A major challenge was dealing with the very high amount of waste debris caused by the typhoon. In the course of one day, Tokage produced 45,000 tons of waste, an amount equal to the total waste the city normally produces over one and a half years.

A number of lessons were learnt form the Tokage typhoon in Toyo-oka with respect to infrastructure management, policy, strategy, and planning, and community activities. The first and foremost lesson the report says is that disaster management plans should incorporate environmental dimensions, and should anticipate the impact of disasters on the environment, as well as the impact of environmental practices (eg. Forest and river management) on the impacts of the disaster.

A number of good environmental measures are in place in Japan but these have to be looked at in light of the needs of disaster management. It is imperative that environmental knowledge is integrated into the prediction, prevention, risk reduction, assessment and response policies, concludes the report.

The impacts of disasters, whether natural or man-made, not only have human dimensions, but environmental ones as well. Deforestation, forest management practices, or agricultural systems can exacerbate the negative environmental impacts of a storm or typhoon, leading to landslides, flooding, silting and water contamination.

“Taking care of our environment reduces the risks that natural and man-made hazards pose to people living today,” said Mr Toepfer.

The new UNEP report on the Tokage Typhoon is available at: http://www.unep.or.jp/.

Original press release: UNEP Launches New Report on the Response to the Devastating Tokage Typhoon (UNEP)

WASHINGTON - President Bush’s push to revise the Clean Air Act sometimes has hindered enforcement of the existing law for cleaning up coal-fired power plants, the Justice Department’s top environmental lawyer said Tuesday.

Congress has balked so far at enacting Bush’s plan to change the way power plants meet air pollution requirements. His “Clear Skies” initiative would ease regulatory controls on utilities and set up a broader market-based system to reduce smokestack emissions.

Complete article: Bush ‘Clear Skies’ Proposal Hinders Power Plant Cleanups, Official Says (ENN - Associated Press)

CAMBRIDGE, MA - Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government announced today that the 2005 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership will go to the FedEx-Environmental Defense Future Vehicle Project. The award - presented bi-annually to celebrate an outstanding partnership project that enhances environmental quality through the use of novel and creative approaches - will be presented to the recipients in the spring of 2005. The award presentation will take place at the Kennedy School of Government.

The Future Vehicle Project - a collaboration of Environmental Defense, FedEx Express and the Eaton Corporation - has introduced a hybrid delivery truck that increases fuel efficiency by over 50% and reduces particulate emissions by 96%. With 18 hybrid trucks already on the road, FedEx plans to build on the success of this demonstration and make the hybrid vehicles the standard replacement in its weight class of 30,000 medium-duty trucks. “This unique project demonstrates that hybrid trucks can be a practical, economically viable alternative, and could become the industry standard,” said Henry Lee, director of the Kennedy School’s Environment and Natural Resources program, in announcing the 2005 award winner. The Roy Award is coordinated by the Environment and Natural Resources program of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Because hybrid trucks reduce air pollution, they promise important improvements in human health, according to Lee. “The trucks also reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global climate change,” he said, “and improved fuel efficiency translates into reductions in oil dependency.”

The hybrid truck partnership was selected from a group of highly qualified nominated projects from around the world that tackled tough environmental problems ranging from deforestation to urban sprawl. In the reviews involving over 30 experts both inside and outside of Harvard, however, the Future Vehicle Project ranked first in each of the three reviews.

Reviewers commented on the project’s “intelligence, elegance and simplicity.” One reviewer summarized the comments of others: “The project creates a template that can be replicated in scale. The leverage is huge in many dimensions. It is creative in its use of the market to achieve environmental goals. It gets beyond rhetoric and adversarial confrontation, and demonstrates effective NGO and private sector partnership. It creates tremendous pressure to perform.”

The Roy Family has been a long-time supporter of the development of public-private partnerships to meet social goals. The family, through its businesses and involvement, is dedicated to promoting innovative approaches to environmental policy and the conservation of natural resources. The Roy Family Award attempts to provide positive incentives for companies and organizations worldwide to push the boundaries of creativity and take risks that result in significant changes that benefit our environment.

The first award, presented in March 2003, recognized efforts to design and implement the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Plan in Bolivia. Noel Kempff Mercado is one of the largest carbon sequestration projects in the world. Carbon sequestration is the absorption of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere associated with global warming. Partners in this project included the American Electric Power Company, Pacific Corp and British Petroleum, Fundacion Amigos de la Naturaleza, the Nature Conservancy, and the government of Bolivia.

The runners-up for the 2005 Roy Family Award included:

• Eden Again Project, Restoration of the Mesopotamian Marshland, Iraq.
• Green Neighborhoods Alliance (GNA), Open Space Residential Design, Massachusetts.
• Mexican National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio), Biodiversity in Mexico.
• WildAid/J. Walter Thompson, Asian Conservation Awareness Program.
• Woods Hole Research Center/Institudo de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM)/MAFLOPS, Family Forests Project, Brazil.

The FedEx-Environmental Defense Future Vehicle Project.
Over the last 4 years, Environmental Defense and FedEx Express have worked together to develop a hybrid diesel-electric delivery truck meeting stringent environmental and economic criteria. The first production models of the new truck, which improve fuel economy by more than 50% while demonstrating the same performance and lifetime cost of ownership as traditional diesels, went into service this spring. If all goes well, FedEx plans to make this a standard replacement vehicle in its weight class of 30,000 medium-duty trucks. This project’s selection was based on its success at pushing cutting-edge technology into the market, careful balancing of environmental and economic concerns to create a win-win solution, and potential for widespread replication.

Original press release: “Harvard Announces 2005 Roy Family Environmental Award; New Hybrid FedEx Trucks Will Reduce Emissions 96%, Increase Fuel Efficiency 50%” (Harvard BCSIA)

Some anticipated the ‘collision of the century’: the vast, drifting B15-A iceberg was apparently on collision course with the floating pier of ice known as the Drygalski ice tongue. Whatever actually happens from here, Envisat’s radar vision will pierce through Antarctic clouds to give researchers a ringside seat.

A collision was predicted to have already occurred by now by some authorities, but B-15A’s drift appears to have slowed markedly in recent days, explains Mark Drinkwater of ESA’s Ice/Oceans Unit: “The iceberg may have run aground just before colliding. This supports the hypothesis that the seabed around the Drygalski ice tongue is shallow, and surrounded by deposits of glacial material that may have helped preserve it from past collisions, despite its apparent fragility.

“What may be needed to release it from its present stalled location is for the surface currents to turn it into the wind, combined with help from a mixture of wind, tides and bottom melting to float it off its perch.”

To follow events for yourself, visit ESA’s Earthwatching site, where the latest images from Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument are being posted online daily.

Opposing ice objects

The largest floating object on Earth, the bottle-shaped B-15A iceberg is around 120 kilometres long with an area exceeding 2500 square kilometres, making it about as large as the entire country of Luxembourg.

B15-A is the largest remaining segment of the even larger B-15 iceberg that calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. Equivalent in size to Jamaica, B-15 had an initial area of 11 655 square kilometres but subsequently broke up into smaller pieces.

Since then B-15A has found its way to McMurdo Sound, where its presence has blocked ocean currents and led to a build-up of sea ice. This has led to turn to resupply difficulties for the United States and New Zealand scientific stations in the vicinity and the starvation of numerous local penguins unable to forage the local sea.

ESA’s Envisat has been tracking the progress of B-15A for more than two years. An animated flyover based on past Envisat imagery begins by depicting the region as it was in January 2004, as seen by the optical Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument (Windows Media Player, 3Mb).

Animated flyover based on Envisat data

The animation then moves four months back in time to illustrate the break-up of the original, larger B-15A (the current B-15A having inherited its name), split asunder by storms and currents while run aground on Ross Island, as observed by repeated ASAR observations. The animation ends with a combined MERIS/ASAR panorama across Victoria Land, including a view of the the Erebus ice tongue, similar to B-15A’s potential ‘victim’, the Drygalski ice tongue.

As the animation shows, ASAR is extremely useful for tracking changes in polar ice. ASAR can peer through the thickest polar clouds and work through local day and night. And because it measures surface texture, the instrument is also extremely sensitive to different types of ice - so the radar image clearly delineates the older, rougher surface of ice tongues from surrounding sea ice, while optical sensors simply show a continuity of snow-covered ice.

“An ice tongue is ‘pure’ glacial ice, while the surrounding ice is fast ice, which is a form of saline sea ice,” Drinkwater says. “To the radar there is extreme backscatter contrast between the relatively pure freshwater ice tongue - which originated on land as snow - and the surrounding sea ice, due to their very different physical and chemical properties.”

The Drygalski ice tongue is located at the opposite end of McMurdo Sound from the US and New Zealand bases. Large and (considered) permanent enough to be depicted on standard atlas maps of the Antarctic continent, the long narrow tongue stretches 70 kilometres out to sea as an extension of the land-based David Glacier, which flows through coastal mountains of Victoria Land.

Measurements show the Drygalski ice tongue has been growing seaward at a rate of between 50 and 900 metres a year. Ice tongues are known to rapidly change their size and shape and waves and storms weaken their ends and sides, breaking off pieces to float as icebergs.

First discovered by British explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1902, the Drygalski ice tongue is around 20 km wide. Its floating glacial ice is between 50 and 200 metres thick. The tongue’s history has been traced back at least as far as 4000 years. One source has been radiocarbon dating of guano from penguin rookeries in the vicinity � the ice tongue has a body of open water on its north side that its presence blocks from freezing, sustaining the penguin population.

“The Drygalski ice tongue has been remarkably resilient over at least the last century,” Drinkwater concludes. “In spite of its apparent vulnerability, shallower bathymetry of the area - enhanced by deposition of glacial sediments - may play an important role in diverting the larger icebergs with more significant draught around this floating promontory.

“This may rule out its potential catastrophic removal from collision with a large drifting berg in the short term. That leaves the elements of temperature variations, wave and tidal flexure, or bending, to weaken and periodically whittle pieces off the end of the ice promontory.”

Providing a wider Antarctic view

The 400-kilometre swath, 150-metre resolution images shown here of B-15A and the Drygalski ice tongue are from ASAR working in Wide Swath Mode (WSM). Envisat also monitors Antarctica in Global Monitoring Mode (GMM), with the same swath but a resolution of one kilometre, enabling rapid mosaicking of the whole of Antarctica to monitor changes in sea ice extent, ice shelves and iceberg movement.

Often prevailing currents transport icebergs far from their initial calving areas way across Antarctica, as with B-15D, another descendant of B-15, which has travelled a quarter way counterclockwise (westerly) around the continent at an average velocity of 10 km a day.

ASAR GMM images are routinely provided to a variety of users including the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Ice Center, responsible for tracking icebergs worldwide.

ASAR imagery is also being used operationally to track icebergs in the Arctic by the Northern View and ICEMON consortia, providing ice monitoring services as part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative, jointly backed by ESA and the European Union. The two consortia are considering plans to extend their services to the Antarctic.

This year also sees the launch of ESA’s CryoSat, a dedicated ice-watching mission designed to precisely map changes in the thickness of polar ice sheets and floating sea ice.

CryoSat should answer the question of whether the kind of icesheet calving that gave rise to B-15 and its descendants are becoming more common, as well as improving our understanding of the relationship between the Earth’s ice cover and the global climate.

Original Press Release: B-15A iceberg’s close encounter monitored by Envisat (ESA)