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Report: Facebook Quietly Abandoned Drilling Gear Off the Oregon Coast:
Facebook has boldly face-planted right into one of the few remaining types of fuckups it hasn't before: quietly abandoning a pile of drilling equipment under the ocean.
Per The Oregonian, Facebook subsidiary Edge Cable Holdings was in the middle of drilling to place a trans-oceanic fiber optic cable off the coast of Tierra Del Mar, Oregon when a drill bit became stuck on April 28, 2020, rupturing a pipe approximately 50 feet below the seafloor. The company moved on, but "about 1,100 feet of pipe, a drill tip, various other tools, and 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid" did not. Edge notified county officials of the accident on May 5, Department of State Lands spokeswoman Ali Hansen told the Oregonian, but declined to mention it had left large amounts of equipment on the seafloor until it told state officials on July 17.
Hansen told The Oregonian that Edge's delay in informing state officials "eliminated any potential options for recovery of the equipment," while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told the newspaper that Edge plans to just construct a separate pipe in 2021 without cleaning up after itself. Hansen's department has notified Edge it is violating permits by continuing to "store" its equipment onsite, the paper reported, as well as notified Facebook it had 30 days to pay damages, 180 days to remove their junk or get a new permit, and must accept any liability for the incident.
[...] Facebook disputed these accounts, saying the state had been notified earlier and adding that Edge had determined its sea trash wouldn't harm the environment.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Friday August 14 2020, @08:47PM (3 children)
A lot of states run their own version of the EPA which you're allowed to do so long as it meets the terms as the Environmental Protection Act* at a minimum.
Oregon is one of those states. While they've probably lost some federal funding they're not as completely ratfucked as the EPA is with a bunch of anti-environmentalists actively destroying things.
*the Environmental Protection Act is what gives the Environmental Protection Agency it's power.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Friday August 14 2020, @09:06PM (1 child)
Trump stuffed every government agency with someone who would do exactly the OPPOSITE of what the mission of that agency is.
EPA, check.
FCC, check.
Dept. of Education, check.
Etc.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 15 2020, @04:12PM
Because... his (stated) mission is to eliminate government. Since he can't do that, he'll make it as ineffective as possible. Then, while everybody is being outraged about his overreaches of power, he can get on with the real business at hand: graft and corruption.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @10:43PM
not yet. FCC succeeding recently in court to keep local laws from interfering with new cell phone cells is probably going to be seen by the current regime as justification for the US EPA regs from not being superceded by local regs in the next couple of months.
Trump pathologically still wants to really stick it to California (EPA vs CARB).