Word: bbl
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...boat and helicopter, sometimes through attics. In Mississippi, corpses were washed out of cemeteries; in Louisiana, residents had to contend with snakes and swarms of fire ants flushed from their nests. Angry waters severed oil pipelines across the Homochitto River near Meadville, Miss., unleashing an estimated 30,000 bbl. of crude oil into the river. Officials in Louisiana, shoulder to shoulder with 140 inmates of state prisons pressed into service, filled sandbags...
...been the font of their prosperity for decades, but now the wealthy sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf are almost literally swimming in the gooey, black liquid. Since March, three damaged Iranian wells have been spewing some 7,000 bbl. a day of crude into the waters of the gulf, producing an oil slick that is roughly the size of New Jersey and that may rank as the second largest in history.* Much of the menacing sludge rests just below the surface of the gulf's usually crystalline waters, but it is betrayed by a bluish sheen that...
...spill began in late January, when a storm toppled a rig in Iran's Nowruz oil field at the northern tip of the gulf. The well had already been damaged two years ago, when a tanker rammed the platform, causing almost 2,000 bbl. a day to pour into the sea. In March, Iraqi helicopter gunships bombed at least two other wells in the same oil field. Those wells began leaking up to 5,000 additional bbl...
...bbl. of oil now floating around the gulf will cause extensive, and permanent, damage to the gulf. Only small fragments of the glutinous mass have washed ashore thus far, but a small change in the predominantly southeasterly wind could drive the main body of the slick onto hundreds of miles of Arab coastline. Says an environmentalist in the gulf: "The slick is not going to go around looking for a home forever." In Qatar alone, the tide of oil could close down two desalination plants that now produce 37 million gal. of fresh water daily, most of the supply...
Such woes are the bust side of the boom that fueled the energy industry at the end of the 1970s. Oilmen, expecting the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to push prices to $50 or even $75 per bbl., spent billions to find and develop wells and then were startled when consumption dropped and prices fell. OPEC, which had been trying to resist the slide, acknowledged the new era last month by cutting its official price 15%, from $34 to $29 per bbl. Observes T. Boone Pickens Jr., chairman of Mesa Petroleum and a 32-year veteran of the industry...