Official: Oil spill hasn’t reached Great Salt Lake

Emergency workers don’t believe 21,000-gallon oil spill has reached Great Salt Lake

Brock Vergakis, Associated Press Writer, On Sunday June 13, 2010, 6:36 pm EDT

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Emergency workers believe they have stopped a 21,000-gallon oil leak from reaching the environmentally sensitive Great Salt Lake, one of the West’s most important inland water bodies for migratory birds that use it as a place to rest, eat and breed.

But the spill has taken a toll on wildlife at area creeks and ponds, coating about 300 birds with oil and possibly threatening an endangered fish.

The leak began Friday night when an underground Chevron Corp. pipeline in the mountains near the University of Utah broke. The breach sent oil into a creek that flows through neighborhoods, into a popular Salt Lake City park, and ultimately into the Jordan River, which flows into the Great Salt Lake.

The 10-inch pipeline was shut off Saturday morning, when workers at a nearby Veterans Administration building smelled oil and called the Salt Lake City fire department, which notified Chevron. The pipe carries crude oil from western Colorado to a refinery near the Salt Lake City International Airport.

Jason Olsen, spokesman for the Salt Lake City Joint Information Center, said Sunday emergency workers believe they have contained the spill to the Jordan River.

But the spill still took its toll on birds at Red Butte Creek and at a large pond at Liberty Park, where visitors often feed birds from the shore and on rented paddle boats. About 300 birds were coated in oil and cleaned at Utah’s Hogle Zoo. Fewer than 10 have died, said Salt Lake City spokeswoman Lisa Harrison-Smith.

Most of the birds were Canada geese, although some ducks were also covered.

Harrison-Smith said the oil also flowed through several other riparian areas, which could threaten a rare Utah fish called a June sucker. It’s been listed as an endangered species since 1986.

Florida Skips Offshore Oil Binge but Still Pays

By DAMIEN CAVE

KEY LARGO, Fla. — When rigs first started drilling for oil off Louisiana’s coast in the 1940s, Floridians scanned their shoreline, with its resorts and talcum-white beaches, and said, No thanks. Go ahead and drill, they told other Gulf Coast states; we’ll stick with tourism.

Now that invisible wall separating Florida from its neighbors has been breached. The spreading BP oil spill has already reached the Panhandle, and if it rides currents to the renowned reefs and fishing holes on both Florida coasts, the Sunshine State could become a vacation destination with the rules of a museum: Look, but don’t touch.

All because other states decided to rely on oil and gas, angry Floridians say; all because, in the water, there are no borders — only currents that can carry catastrophes hundreds of miles.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Mike McLaughlin, 42, while stretching tanned shark skin on a dock here in the Keys. “We’re just sitting here, waiting for it all to disappear.”

Many Floridians, of course, say they are heartbroken for Louisiana, and they still reserve their most caustic criticism for BP and government regulators.

But with oil continuing to gush from a well off Louisiana, Florida has grown angrier at its oil-friendly neighbors. Gov. Charlie Crist said in an interview last week that “there’s a certain level of frustration” with the fact that Florida gets little if any financial benefit from offshore drilling, even though it shares the environmental risks.

On docks and beaches, many Floridians are less measured, and compare Louisiana to a neighbor with a bonfire that has set their block ablaze.

To some extent, it is a conflict set up by history. Louisiana and Florida may share the Gulf of Mexico, but they are essentially oil opposites.

Ever since World War II, when tar balls washed ashore across the gulf after German U-boats sank Allied oil tankers, Florida officials have held drilling at bay with state laws and lobbying in Washington to protect their state’s bustling tourism industry.

Louisiana, meanwhile, is an oil state through and through that discovered its first commercial deposits in 1901 and started drilling offshore in 1947.

State officials have never looked back, and the resulting divide between the two states is now economic as well as cultural: oil and gas contribute about $65 billion a year to the Louisiana economy, according to the state’s oil and gas association, while in Florida, tourism accounts for about $60 billion.

SEC puts in new ‘circuit breaker’ rules

SEC puts into place new ‘circuit breaker’ rules to prevent repeat of May 6 stock market plunge

Marcy Gordon, AP Business Writer, On Thursday June 10, 2010, 5:44 pm EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators on Thursday put in place new rules aimed at preventing a repeat of last month’s harrowing “flash crash” in the stock market.

Members of the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the rules, which call for U.S. stock exchanges to briefly halt trading of some stocks that make big swings.

The major exchanges will start putting the trading breaks into effect as early as Friday for six months. The New York Stock Exchange will begin Friday’s trading session with five stocks: EOG Resources Inc., Genuine Parts Co., Harley Davidson Inc., Ryder System Inc. and Zimmer Holdings Inc. The exchange will gradually add other stocks early next week, expecting to reach by Wednesday the full number that will be covered.

The Nasdaq stock market plans to have the new program fully in place on Monday.

The plan for the “circuit breakers” was worked out by the SEC and the major exchanges following the May 6 market plunge, which saw the Dow Jones industrials lose nearly 1,000 points in less than a half-hour.

Under the new rules, trading of any Standard & Poor’s 500 stock that rises or falls 10 percent or more in a five-minute period will be halted for five minutes. The “circuit breakers” would be applied if the price swing occurs between 9:45 a.m. and 3:35 p.m. Eastern time. That’s almost the entire trading day. But it leaves out the final 25 minutes before the close — a period that often sees raging price swings, especially in recent weeks as the kind of volatility that marked the 2008 financial crisis returned.

The idea is for the trading pause to draw attention to an affected stock, establish a reasonable market price and resume trading “in a fair and orderly fashion,” the SEC said.

On May 6, about 30 stocks listed in the S&P 500 index fell at least 10 percent within five minutes. The drop briefly wiped out $1 trillion in market value as some stocks traded as low as a penny.

The disruption “illustrated a sudden, but temporary, breakdown in the market’s price-setting function when a number of stocks and (exchange-traded funds) were executed at clearly irrational prices,” SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said in a statement. “By establishing a set of circuit breakers that uniformly pauses trading in a given security across all venues, these new rules will ensure that all markets pause simultaneously and provide time for buyers and sellers to trade at rational prices.”