A natural gas line explosion early Tuesday morning in Louisiana evacuated about 55 people from their homes and closed off roads leading to the area near Enon, outside New Orleans.

WWL TV reports:

The amount of scorched earth near the explosion made it appear as if a bomb was detonated, Seal said.

An approximate 80-foot segment of the pipeline was blown away, causing a nearly 300-foot heavily-wooded radius to be completely leveled, according to Louisiana State Police Trooper Nick Manale.

Florida Gas, who owns the line, shut down the gas line around 6:45 a.m.
Seal said the company released more gas in an attempt to get the remaining "residual gas out of the pipeline. So you may be hearing a few more explosions, but nothing serious is going to happen."

"Crews have isolated and contained the west end of that pipeline, basically the ignition source is now gone from that pipeline, and all of the residual natural gas has been drained," Manale said.

He said there is still a small amount of ignition aflame on the east side coming from the Bogalusa area. Crews are working to drain the pressure and residual gas out of the segment.

The report from the Louisiana State Police and Department of Environmental Quality Hazmat indicated the suspected cause of the explosion was a rupture of a 30-inch natural gas line, according to the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. The cause of the explosion remained under investigation.

Amazingly, there were no injuries and no fatalities as a result of the explosion. Approximately 10,000 area residents lost power.

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Two out of every three people face hunger as Haiti woes mount.

The hardship of hunger abounds amid the stone homes and teepee-like huts in the mountains along Haiti's southern coast.

The hair on broomstick-thin children has turned patchy and orangish, their stomachs have ballooned to the size of their heads and many look half their age - the tell-tale signs of malnutrition.

Mabriole town official Geneus Lissage fears that death is imminent for these children if Haitian authorities and humanitarian workers don't do more to stem the hunger problems.

"They will be counting bodies," Lissage said, "because malnutrition is ravaging children, youngsters and babies."

Three years after an earthquake killed hundreds of thousands and the U.S. promised that Haiti would "build back better," hunger is worse than ever. Despite billions of dollars from around the world pledged toward rebuilding efforts, the country's food problems underscore just how vulnerable its 10 million people remain.

In 1997 some 1.2 million Haitians didn't have enough food to eat. A decade later the number had more than doubled. Today, that figure is 6.7 million, or a staggering 67 percent of the population that goes without food some days, can't afford a balanced diet or has limited access to food, according to surveys by the government's National Coordination of Food Security. As many as 1.5 million of those face malnutrition and other hunger-related problems.

More at the Miami Herald.

H/T Media Matters

Good morning, and TGIF! The right wing media need a science class. If only Bill Nye could educate them all one by one.

Your morning open thread begins below...

In Appalachia, children are 42 percent more likely to have birth defects if they live near a mountaintop removal coal mine. Citizens are 50 percent more likely to suffer from cancer. This video from Appalachian Voices features children giving the basic lesson that blowing up mountains and dumping the waste in nearby rivers is harming their communities. Share the video and join the campaign to tell President Obama: No more excuses. End Mountaintop Removal. Now.

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Arkansas Matters:

"You can see it's just nasty. It was never like this before," said Robin Lang as she pointed to green, turbid water in her backyard.

Two days before the two-month anniversary of the Mayflower oil spill, folks like Lang who live on "The Cove" section of Lake Conway are still wondering when life will be back to normal.

Oil collecting boom stretches across her lake view, and an airboat patrols daily collecting remnants of the spill.

Lang says wildlife is nowhere to be seen.

"It's like a desert area," she said. "Everything just left. I mean what would want to be in this water?"

While Exxon paid the residents of The Cove $2,500 each for their troubles, there is no agreement to protect their property values. There is also no one cleaning the properties in The Cove as they are in Northwoods subdivision.

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The government of Canadian British Columbia has said 'No' to Enbridge's West Coast tar sands pipeline project, the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The Calgary Herald:

"(Enbridge Northern Gateway) has presented little evidence about how it will respond in the event of a spill," the province wrote in its submission to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel.

"Put another way, it is not clear from the evidence that NG (Northern Gateway) will in fact be able to respond effectively to spills either from the pipeline itself, or from tankers transporting diluted Bitumen from the proposed Kitimat terminal."

The strongly worded submission made clear the B.C. government believes the company has yet to lay out how it would respond to a catastrophic spill - something it said is particularly important here.

"The project before JRP (Joint Review Panel) is not a typical pipeline. For example: the behavior in water of the material to be transported is incompletely understood; the terrain the pipeline would cross is not only remote, it is in many places extremely difficult to access; the impact of spills into pristine river environments would be profound," the province wrote.

"In these particular and unique circumstances, NG should not be granted a certificate on the basis of a promise to do more study and planning once the certificate is granted. The standard in this particular case must be higher," it added.

"'Trust me' is not good enough in this case."

Founder of 350.org Bill McKibben said Friday, the decision marks an important win for the climate movement. Anti-tar sands campaigners will now be looking for Obama to follow suit and reject TransCanada's bid to build the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, a separate export route for Alberta's tar sands that would pass south to the Texas coast.

"For years the tar sands promoters have said: ‘if we don't build Keystone XL the tar sands will get out some other way,'" McKibben said in a statement.

But, he continued, "British Columbians just slammed the door on the most obvious other way, so now it's up to President Obama. If he approve Keystone XL he bails out the Koch Brothers and other tar sands investors; if he rejects the pipeline, then an awful lot of that crude is going to stay in the ground where it belongs."

This also certainly makes plans to export tar sands oil much more complicated.

[Some language not suitable for work.]

On May 12, 2013, Vera Scroggins, accompanied by The Environment TV, interviewed Ray, who has documented the changes in his well water since the gas industry began drilling in his hometown of Dimock, PA. This is the Frack zone, this is frack country.

Imagine having your drinking water tested and discover that you've got weapons grade uranium in your well, among other things.

ProPublica reported on the drinking water in Dimock in 2012:

"The water in Dimock first became the focus of international attention after residents there alleged in 2009 that natural gas drilling, and fracking, had led to widespread contamination. That April, ProPublica reported that a woman’s drinking water well blew up. Pennsylvania officials eventually determined that underground methane gas leaks had been caused by Cabot Oil and Gas, which was drilling wells nearby. Pennsylvania sanctioned Cabot, and for a short time the company provided drinking water to households in the Dimock area."
...

"As the agency has elsewhere, the EPA began the testing in Dimock in search of methane and found it.

Methane is not considered poisonous to drink, and therefore is not a health threat in the same way as other pollutants. But the gas can collect in confined spaces and cause deadly explosions, or smother people if they breathe too much of it. Four of the five residential water results obtained by ProPublica show methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards; one as high as seven times the threshold and nearly twice the EPA’s less stringent standard.

The methane detections were accompanied by ethane, another type of natural gas that experts say often signifies the methane came from deeply buried gas deposits similar to those being drilled for energy and not from natural sources near the surface.

Among the other substances detected at low levels in Dimock’s water are a suite of chemicals known to come from some sort of hydrocarbon substance, such as diesel fuel or roofing tar. They include anthracene, fluoranthene, pyrene and benzo(a)pyrene– all substances described by a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as cancer-causing even in very small amounts. Chromium, aluminum, lead and other metals were also detected, as were chlorides, salts, bromide and strontium, minerals that can occur naturally but are often associated with natural gas drilling."

In a diary posted at Daily Kos, Van Jones writes:

"We have been hearing a lot about scandals recently.

But if President Obama approves a pipeline equal to more than seven new coal-fired power plants? And does so just months after promising to act AGAINST climate change?

Now THAT'S a scandal.

President Obama said in his second inaugural address that failing to act on climate change would "betray future generations." Now, it looks like he will do exactly that by approving the Keystone XL pipeline."

Then after asking for help to spread the message in his video (above) he writes:

"If President Obama truly thinks this project is good for America, he should embrace it publicly. He should call it the "Obama Tar Sands Pipeline." He should show up at the ribbon cutting. If he refuses to do that and still approves Keystone XL, the first thing that pipeline will run over is his credibility on climate."

I think Mr. Jones put that very mildly, but agree with it all completely.

Guest host Mark Thompson, “The War Room” host Michael Shure, Sierra Club Washington representative Lena Moffitt and BuzzFeed contributor Michael Hastings break down the Koch brothers’ involvement in petroleum coke being openly stored on the banks of Detroit River. Petroleum coke is a by-product of the oil refining process and can be harmful to the environment when burned. “This is the dirtiest by-product from the dirtiest source of oil on the planet,” Moffit says, adding that the 42817 ZIP code in Detroit “is one of the most polluted ZIP codes in the country. … This is the unfortunate lab where we can see what it means to bring tar sands to our country.”