Word: petroleum
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Danger is a constant companion of workers in the petrochemical industry. But no one could be prepared for the explosions and the fireball that last week reduced a Phillips Petroleum Co. plastics plant near Houston to a blackened maze. "It was like being inside a bomb," said purchasing agent Clay Howell, who was knocked out of his chair 350 yds. from the blasts. Trying to stop the inferno was "like spitting in the ocean," said Houston fireman Joseph Phillips. Twenty-two employees were either killed or presumed dead...
When Exxon reckoned in July that it would spend nearly $1.3 billion to clean up its Alaskan oil spill, liability lawyers knew that was just the beginning. In Anchorage last week the state of Alaska filed a civil suit against the petroleum giant and the owners of the trans-Alaska pipeline, seeking unspecified damages that could total billions of dollars. Alaska charges the oil companies with deceiving the public about the safety of the shipping operation and with incompetence in the cleanup...
...NOTES by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence; $16.95). There is no better conversation than good shop talk; here a petroleum geologist ("I know how to find oil") tells many of the tricks of his trade and proves, in the process, that he also knows how to write...
Rick Bass was a fence post in his third-grade play. His father still calls him "Animal." As a petroleum geologist around Jackson, Miss., he drove a lot but was hard on automobiles. After he steered one company car into shallow water, the boss sent him a 20-ft. length of chain for Christmas. Bass acknowledges his clumsiness: "Sometimes I feel almost out of control." But he glories in a rare natural gift: "I know how to find...
...attest, he also knows how to write; and like his oil witchery, this gift is % extravagant and natural. His new book is based on notebook jottings he kept for about three years, 1984-87, chasing a quarry that was "shy here, coy there, blatant elsewhere." His father, another petroleum geologist, complained after reading Oil Notes that he didn't learn much from it about finding oil, but to the uninitiated it richly reveals just what that line of work involves. There is no better conversation, spoken or written, than good shop talk, and this is superb -- direct, expert and reeling...