Word: exxon
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...markets, such as Houston, got overbuilt so many years ago that demand is finally catching up with supply. An 18-story office building owned by Exxon's real estate subsidiary is rising from the ashes of the city's north side -- the first major new commercial structure in five years -- and it is already mostly rented. Other skyscrapers, long mothballed, report 70% to 90% occupancy, evidence that the economy is reviving, diversifying and depending less on swings in oil prices. But Houston's vacancy rate is still a painful 25%, with even heavier vacancies in lower-quality buildings...
...billion liters (294 million gal.) of crude oil had escaped from Kuwait's Sea Island terminal before allied bombing raids on pumps feeding the facility reduced the torrent to a trickle. That makes the spill by far the largest ever, not 12 times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, as originally thought, but 27 times as large. And that does not include oil that began gushing last week from a second spill farther north. The magnitude of the mess is such that "it can't be cleaned up," says Jim Rhodes, of ABASCO, a maker of cleanup equipment...
...destructive power by burning off some of the oil, using chemical dispersants to break it up and removing more with surface-skimming devices deployed from boats. But the best they could hope for in a war zone was to protect a few key spots. "We learned in the Exxon Valdez cleanup that you can't control the oil but you can exclude it from a small area," says Randy Bayliss, a consultant involved in the Alaskan effort...
Nature has a way of confounding even experts' predictions. After all, Prince William Sound recovered from the Exxon Valdez disaster more quickly than expected. But no one has ever seen a spill of this size, and no one can say that "eco-terrorism" in the gulf is over. The Iraqis could, in the words of an American engineer, let "rivers of oil run into the sea." Saudi and U.S. forces would try to stop that, but it may already be too late to prevent the teeming gulf from becoming a dead...
...Iraqis may have released up to 120 million gal. by late last week -- almost a dozen times as much as the Exxon Valdez leaked into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989. And this time any cleanup could be a deadly mission in itself. The spill is "in enemy territory," says Marine Major General Robert Johnston, the U.S. Central Command's chief of staff. "We can't just go in and shut...