Exxon Valdez spill is world's worst oil pollution accident - March 24, 1989
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Eleven million gallons of crude oil devastated Alaska's coastline and wildlife when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and began to leak its cargo.
One of the greatest environmental disasters of modern times occurred on this day in 1989, when the US supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling at least 11 million gallons of oil into the ocean.
As the video above recalls, the spill affected 1,300 miles of shoreline and would cover over 11,000 square miles of ocean, killing hundreds of thousands of birds and sea mammals and hugely disrupting the economy of the area.
Immediate recovery and clean-up efforts were hampered by the location of the spill – accessible only by boat, plane or helicopter – and high winds, which prevented attempts to suck the slick from the top of the waters.
The crash was later blamed on crew fatigue and overwork and the failure of the third mate, who was piloting the tanker, to use its Collision Avoidance System radar; it has subsequently been suggested that the equipment was faulty.
The vessel had left normal shipping lanes to avoid icebergs, but had failed to return to them before running aground on the reef. Its captain, Joe Hazelwood, was found to have been drinking and was asleep in his cabin at the time of the collision.
Although attempts to burn the oil off were partially successful, oil company Exxon was widely criticised for its slow response to the disaster. In 1994 a federal court ordered the company to pay $5 billion in punitive damages.
This was reduced to $2.5 billion on appeal, and even further by the US Supreme Court in 2008. Exxon has paid out over $1 billion in damages to date. By 2010, more than $2 billion had been spent on the clean-up operation.
Thứ Bảy, 24 tháng 3, 2018
Exxon Valdez spill is world's worst oil pollution accident - March 24, 1989 - this day in history
Thứ Sáu, 23 tháng 3, 2018
OK enters national vernacular
On this day in 1839, the initials “O.K.” are first published in The Boston Morning Post. Meant as an abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time, OK steadily made its way into the everyday speech of Americans.
During the late 1830s, it was a favorite practice among younger, educated circles to misspell words intentionally, then abbreviate them and use them as slang when talking to one another. Just as teenagers today have their own slang based on distortions of common words, such as “kewl” for “cool” or “DZ” for “these,” the “in crowd” of the 1830s had a whole host of slang terms they abbreviated. Popular abbreviations included “KY” for “No use” (“know yuse”), “KG” for “No go” (“Know go”), and “OW” for all right (“oll wright”).
Of all the abbreviations used during that time, OK was propelled into the limelight when it was printed in the Boston Morning Post as part of a joke. Its popularity exploded when it was picked up by contemporary politicians. When the incumbent president Martin Van Buren was up for reelection, his Democratic supporters organized a band of thugs to influence voters. This group was formally called the “O.K. Club,” which referred both to Van Buren’s nickname “Old Kinderhook” (based on his hometown of Kinderhook, New York), and to the term recently made popular in the papers. At the same time, the opposing Whig Party made use of “OK” to denigrate Van Buren’s political mentor Andrew Jackson. According to the Whigs, Jackson invented the abbreviation “OK” to cover up his own misspelling of “all correct.”
The man responsible for unraveling the mystery behind “OK” was an American linguist named Allen Walker Read. An English professor at Columbia University, Read dispelled a host of erroneous theories on the origins of “OK,” ranging from the name of a popular Army biscuit (Orrin Kendall) to the name of a Haitian port famed for its rum (Aux Cayes) to the signature of a Choctaw chief named Old Keokuk. Whatever its origins, “OK” has become one of the most ubiquitous terms in the world, and certainly one of America’s greatest lingual exports.
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