Chris Amico: Journalist

The PBS NewsHour’s Gulf Leak Meter grew out of a simple question: How much oil has leaked into the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20 and sank two days later?

Given a starting point and a flow rate, figuring out how much has spilled isn’t actually that hard: Total = Rate x Time. But choosing the correct rate was probably impossible. Official estimates went from 1,000 barrels a day to 5,000 to somewhere between 35,000 and 60,000. As more information trickled out, independent scientists said the leak could be as high as 100,000 barrels per day.

So the challenge was to build a tool that would do simple math, but had all the uncertainty of the situation baked in. Hence the slider. That way, we let users pick which estimates they believe, and the ticker shows them how much oil has leaked into the Gulf based on that figure.

When BP began siphoning oil directly out of the well using a mile-long tube, I rewrote part of the code to subtract that amount from the leak rate–after the user had picked a leak rate. When BP increased, then decreased, the amount of oil it was capturing, I rewrote the main function again. Now, each time BP tells us how much oil it is sucking up, we create another time segment, adjusted by the siphoned amount, and add it to the total. If this sounds confusing, well, thank BP.

Production notes

The widget itself is embeddable as an iframe. It is built entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. An explanation of the math and a working (though deliberately incorrect) version is available here.

Coverage and Commentary

Al Tompkins, Poynter Online: Virtual Meter Lets Viewers Estimate How Much Oil Is Leaking in Gulf

So far, nothing — not the oily birds or the nasty-looking ribbon of waste floating on the Gulf of Mexico’s surface — has stunned me as much as this rolling graphic from, of all places, the website of the PBS “NewsHour.”

MediaPost: The 100 Most Important Online Publishers

Look no further than the depressing widget Newshour created and the video feed it adapted to keep the public informed about the BP Gulf oil spill disaster and you’ll see why Public Broadcasting still matters online.

PBS MediaShift: 6 Key Lessons From NewsHour’s Coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill

My own debriefing of what worked and what we learned covering the spill.

Funded by and produced for Spot.us. See other places this story has been published here. For production notes, read below.

Can California’s cement industry walk the fine line between regulation and innovation to fight global warming?

CUPERTINO, California–From the lip of the quarry at Hanson Permanente cement, all of Santa Clara stretches out in panorama. (Photos here).

Few plants in California are this close to this many people. Most of the state’s 11 kilns are well away from population centers, close enough for workers to commute, but otherwise out of sight.

Here, houses reach right up to the edges the Permanente land, where suburban homes suddenly give way to an industrial road leading up to the expansive plant and the limestone mining operation behind it.

Here, engineers and executives will have to figure out how to make an essentially dirty process clean, or at least cleaner.

As California tries to fight global warming–with or without the rest of the country–cement manufacturing remains one of the trickiest industries to regulate.

“I don’t think there’s anybody quite like cement,” said Mike Tollstrup, one of the state officials overseeing California’s effort to fight global warming on its own. “There are not a lot of facilities. Cement is used everywhere. There are significant issues of leakage. If we don’t do it right, the potential for increasing emissions is a real concern.” Read the rest of this entry »