Wikipedia:Peer review/2009 Cataño oil refinery fire/archive1

2009 Cataño oil refinery fire

This peer review discussion has been closed.

This was a major event in Puerto Rico's recent history, with broad environmental, economic, and even political consequences. I would like to improve this article to GA and even eventually FA, but I am not sure were to begin, what to keep what to take out etc.

There is a lot of information missing, it seems like it was barely updated since it was started and stopped being news. Any help would be awesome.

Thanks, Cerejota (talk) 11:49, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this article, which is a long way from GA quality. You wrote: "There is a lot of information missing, it seems like it was barely updated since it was started and stopped being news." That is exactly right. To have any hope of GA, you will need to find updated information including the final damage estimates, details about the lawsuit, and details about how Puerto Rico is coping with the loss of the refinery. If I were working on the article, I would fix the dates to include the year as well as the month and day, and I'd try to answer questions almost any reader would ask such as "Has Fort Buchanan re-opened"? Is the investigation over? Was the final cost to the Puerto Rican government $6.4 million, or was the final number bigger than that? Who is suing? How is the suit progressing? Was Gulf Oil accountable in any way? What are the political repercussions, if any?

• After you finish adding new information, you might ask someone at WP:GOCE#REQ to look the article over for Manual of Style issues. I note some below, but I don't think I caught them all.

• An infobox would make the layout more attractive. Template:Infobox news event looks appropriate.

• The link checker at the top of this review page finds three dead URLs in the citations. They are probably the ones marked with "dead link" tags. You might be able to find the wire service items in the archives of another newspaper that you have access to. Sometimes you can find archives of files that have gone missing by using the Wayback Machine or just doing a Google search.

• I ran a Google search just now using the search string "oil refinery fire puerto rico" and got 469,000 hits. This is an absurdly large number, but it's a start, and the first 20 items or so look interesting.

Event

• "The tanks exploded at approximately 12:23 a.m. and could be heard in places as far away as Cidra, 11 miles away and shook windows and doors over two miles away." - The imperial units should be given in metric also; i.e., 11 miles (18 km) and 2 miles (3 km).

• "At some point the flames reached a height of 100 feet (30 m) above the refinery near 50 feet." - This is unclear. I'm not sure what is meant by "above the refinery near 50 feet". Do you mean "directly above the refinery"?

• "Fortunately, nobody was critically injured in the explosion." - Even though you might find no one who would disagree with the sentiment, "fortunately" is an editorial comment best left out. It's better to just report the facts: "Nobody was critically injured in the explosion."

Initial response

• "The call came to the Puerto Rico 9-1-1 office at 12:27 am." - Here I see "am", but in the first sentence of the "Event" section I see "a.m.", and in the lead I see "12:23am" run together with no space. I would recommend "a.m." separated from the digits by a space. In addition I would add a no-break code to keep the digits and the "a.m." from being accidentally separated by line break on various computer screens. WP:NBSP has details about uses of the no-break code.

• "Later, due to the seriousness of the situation, PRFD... " - The Manual of Style recommends spelling out and abbreviating things like this on first use. Otherwise, the reader has to figure out what PRFD might mean. The place to explain this one would be in the previous sentence: "The Puerto Rico Fire Department stations of Bayamon... ". The fix looks like this: "The Puerto Rico Fire Department (PRFD) stations of Bayamon... ". Then PRFD makes sense by itself later on. ATF is another one, as is EPA, and you might find more.

Government aid

• A lot of the information in this section is out of date, especially the reference to October 25, which refers to 2009 I assume.

Investigation

• "The Caribbean Petroleum Corporation supplies most of Puerto Rico's oil and gasoline, which is marketed under the Gulf Oil brand name, but only 10 percent is managed from this plant." - This seems out of date too. The next section says the company has filed for bankruptcy. Do they still supply most of Puerto Rico's oil and gasoline? If not, who does?

Aftermath

• "The action was filed by lawyers John Navares, Camilo Salas, and Daniel Becnel." - On behalf of whom? Also, I only count two lawsuits, the one filed by the three lawyers and the one filed on behalf of 1,000 defendants.

References

• Use a single kind of date formatting throughout the reference section, not 2009-10-25 in one place and October 23, 2009 in another.

• Add an access date to the citations that don't have one; e.g., citation 13.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 03:11, 21 August 2011 (UTC)