No one was injured in the blaze and all non-essential staff have been airlifted from the West Atlas rig, operators PTTEP said.
The fire, which started during an attempt to plug the leak, comes as environmental campaigners criticised PTTEP and the Australian government over their handling of the crisis.
An estimated 400 barrels of oil a day have escaped from the rig since Aug. 21.
Officials now plan to pour mud into the leak hoping to remove the source of fuel from the fire, which was sending huge plumes of smoke into the sky.
SYDNEY - As the world focuses on the impact of climate change, little attention is being paid to yet another environmental bane: increasing contamination of air, water and soil.
The combined effects of this environmental scourge have contributed to global epidemics of cancers, lung and other degenerative diseases, and costing health systems across the world millions of dollars, experts say.
Forty-two years after she was exposed to asbestos in the Pambula beach hamlet, 470 kilometres south of Sydney, Jeanette Hennessy Wright, 51, was diagnosed with mesothelioma in July 2008.
Some of the most toxic communities in the country
confronted the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday, hoping for a sign that the new administration is more willing than its predecessor to deal with the legacy of environmental racism in the south.
EPA Region 4 includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Polluters who contaminate drinking water and make people sick shouldn't get off easy. That has been the focus of my work for two decades, and I'm not planning to stop now.
My work focused the attention of the world on a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium (hex chrome). In 1996, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. - a multibillion-dollar corporation - paid $333 million in damages to the people of Hinkley for contaminating their drinking water and covering up the problem for decades while people got sick and died. This victory was immortalized in film. But the story doesn't end there.
Things
aren't looking pretty for drinking water these days. Recent articles
from The New York Times and the Associated Press have
exposed unchecked pollution, grave gaps in oversight, decaying
infrastructure, and concerns about emerging contaminants.
If Iowa hadn't exercised good judgment and supported Barack Obama in the caucuses nearly two years ago, I wouldn't have awakened in my Des Moines hotel last week and felt as grateful as I did.
For on the front page of the Des Moines Register last Thursday was the announcement that should have been made years ago. The Obama administration's Environmental Protection Agency is taking a U-turn and plans a yearlong investigation into the safety of the second most commonly used herbicide in the nation: atrazine.
If you own land in Colorado, your rights could end a few feet from the surface.
"Split Estate," a new documentary by filmmaker Debra Anderson, explores the boom in drilling by oil and gas companies on privately owned land in the Rocky Mountain states in recent years. Anderson discovered U.S. law favors those who hold mineral rights over landowners.
MASONTOWN, Pa. - For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired
power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste
in their yards.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's long awaited plan for
drilling in the Marcellus Shale was just released. The Shale, which
stretches from Ohio to New York is believed to be the country's largest
remaining reservoir of natural gas. Drilling has begun in Pennsylvania
and West Virginia and there have already been reports of contaminated wells.
There are some places in the world where there is
no word for garbage. The idea that an object could have no purpose, or be brought into being only to be discarded, is so alien that the concept simply does not exist. America is not one of them.
