The Gulf Disaster One Year Later

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Some of the top stories around the web on the anniversary of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon:

The Times-Picayune remembers the 11 men whose lives were lost at sea.

The Center for Public Integrity has an excellent piece today about BP’s public relations work on the Gulf, focusing on one woman in particular who became the company’s friendly face for community outreach. Turns out she has history of playing the public on BP’s behalf.

Scientific American has a piece looking at the long-term impact for wildlife in the Gulf, concluding that there are still more questions than answers when it comes to the health of the ecosystem.

The NAACP published a report today, “My Name is 6508799,” which details the economic and health impacts for Gulf coast residents, many of them minorities, in the past year.

Over at Grist, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) weighs in on what has changed in terms of drilling safety in the past year. His conclusion: Not a damn thing.

More than 3,200 oil and gas wells are still unplugged in the Gulf, threatening the same waters besieged by the 4.9-million barrel spill last year, the Associated Press reports today. The wells are still classified as “active,” even though they haven’t been tapped for five years and no one plans to come back to them anytime soon.

The New York Times has a nice short profile of Michael Bromwich, the guy tapped to head the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement in the wake of the spill.

National Geographic looks at six things that experts got wrong about the spill.

On Tuesday, the federal government reopened the last of the Gulf waters closed to fishing during the spill.

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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