How would you like to head out to your field to harvest your wheat crop and find this: Massive oil pipeline break under North Dakota farmer’s wheat field.

Another one of those safe and secure, well-build pipelines that you will never know is even on your land. Now the farmer has huge block of his farm that can’t be used for anything, and if it isn’t cleaned up, the damage will spread.

Fortunately this break wasn’t near any waterways or known aquifers, but there is no way in hell you can run the Keystone XL pipeline that won’t involve crossing both as it runs from Alberta to Texas.

The CBC reports that David Suzuki tells U.S. not to trust Harper’s Keystone XL promises.

Americans who watch PBS will be familiar with Dr Suzuki as the host of the series, The Nature of Things. He is a well-known and respected Canadian environmentalist, and a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

His basic complaint is that the government of Mr Harper has prevented scientists who work for the government from publishing their opinions, and has failed to base climate and environmental decisions on the best available science.

I look at it this way – British Columbia is the province to the west of Alberta, and they don’t want a tar sands pipeline to run through their territory down to their refineries on the Pacific. When the people behind the XL Pipeline can’t convince a neighbor to allow them to lay a pipeline a few hundred miles to the Pacific, why would the US want to let them run it a couple of thousand miles to the Gulf Coast?

From the BBC: Cyclone Phailin makes landfall in India

A huge cyclone that has forced as many as 500,000 people to flee their homes has made landfall in eastern India.

Winds were measured at 200 km/h (125mph) as Cyclone Phailin hit the coast near Gopalpur, Orissa state, at about 21:15 (15:45 GMT).

Authorities had predicted a storm surge of at least 3m (10ft) that was expected to cause extensive damage.

Officials say they are better prepared than in 1999 when a cyclone killed thousands of people in Orissa.

Cyclone Phailin has been classed as “very severe”, and the head of India’s Meteorological Office, LS Rathore, said it would remain in that category for six hours before losing strength.

The eye of the storm was moving at 10-15 km/h (6-9mph), he said.

The pressure reported at landfall was 938mb which is associated with 140mph winds and Category 4 status. At one point in the track the winds were reported at 155mph, on the verge of a Category 5.

This came ashore from the Bay of Bengal which is shallow and hot like the Bay of Campeche in the southern Gulf of Mexico, and it was moving slow enough and was big enough to have been pushing a 5 meter [16 foot] storm surge. It is also going to produce heavy rain that will cause flooding in the area.

The local government pushed for evacuations and that seems to have been observed, so that should reduce the death toll from the storm.