In March 2001 the Petrobras 36 Oil Platform (P-36) was the world’s largest floating oil production platform, operating 130 km (80 mi) off the Brazilian coast in the Roncador Field. Tragically, by the end of the month it was floating no more. The platform had started life as the drilling rig Spirit of Columbus, before …
A vast area in the marshy lowlands of Las Marismas, around southwestern Spain’s Guadalquivir River, was designated as a wildlife refuge and national park in 1963. Donana National Park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, but not before suffering persistent threats to its unique ecosystem caused by water extraction for agricultural irrigation and …
Becoming a miner in South Africa during the 20th century was a dirty and dangerous case of needs must. With a chronic lack of alternative employment, a workforce of black miners came from all over the country to live in dormitories and earn modest wages that nonetheless meant survival for families left behind. Sadly, many …
Anyone who wants to damage the largest possible number of people in the shortest possible time could find few better methods than sipping a large amount of poison into the public water supply system. That’s not actually what happened at South West Water’s unmanned Lowermoor Water Treatment Works in North Cornwall, but the incident that …
The discovery of North Sea oil and gas was a boon to Britain. Piper Alpha made a productive contribution. Originally an oil platform, it was later modified for gas production and consisted of four safety modifies separated by firewalls. In July 1988 Piper Alpha was producing ten per cent of the North Sea’s annual production. …
The catastrophic nuclear disaster the world had long feared finally happened in 1986 at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine. Reactor number four exploded early one morning in April, sending a vast plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. This would contaminate large areas of the western Soviet Union and Europe, with nuclear rain being recorded …