Seriously? BP admitted today that a pipeline leak on Saturday resulted in “2100 to 4200 gallons” of oil being spilled onto the Alaskan tundra. After last year’s five million barrels spilt, can they really afford even small screw-ups? [Yahoo News]
The Big Dig, a Boston engineering boondoggle that’s national news mostly because you helped us pay for it, is basically a death trap. It’s killed people already, and some precariously perched lights were apparently preparing to off a few more.
This week is the centennial of the Titanic’s launch, May 31, 1911. Why was she considered unsinkable? Because of her 30 compartments which could be sealed against one another with a pull of a single lever. [The Scuttlefish]
According to an Airbus telex sent to all airlines using their A330, the flight recorders on Air France flight 447 confirm that their aeroplane didn’t suffer any failure and they shouldn’t take any precautionary measure:
So, you know those black boxes they found from Air France Flight 447, which crashed midway between a flight from Sao Paulo to Paris? They managed to recover all the data from them.
Alabama’s Brown’s Ferry nuclear plant, the second-largest in the US, lost power as a result of yesterday’s huge tornado that ripped through Tuscaloosa. Thankfully, it shut down as designed, averting a crisis like the one in Fukushima. [Reuters]
