Tougher Rules Urged for Offshore Drilling
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: January 11, 2011
WASHINGTON — The presidential panel investigating the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico recommended on Tuesday that Congress approve substantial new spending and sweeping new regulations for offshore oil operations at a time when the appetite for both is low.
Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
William K. Reilly, left, and Bob Graham released their panel's final report on Tuesday on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Lens Blog: Painting in Deadly Oil(January 11, 2011)
Releasing its final report, the commission found that the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill arose from a preventable series of corporate and regulatory failures. It warned that unless industry practices and government regulation improved, another such accident was inevitable.
“If dramatic steps are not taken,” said Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator from Florida and a co-chairman of the commission, “I’m afraid at some point in the coming years another failure will occur, and we will wonder why did the Congress, why did the administration, why did the industry allow this to happen again.”
The commissioners presented their findings to President Obama and several top advisers on Tuesday afternoon. The president said he was working to adopt many of their recommendations but also noted that any actions requiring new financing and regulations would be a hard sell in the current Congress, said William K. Reilly, co-chairman of the commission and a former administrator of theEnvironmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Reilly and Mr. Graham said they intended to urge the drilling industry to support a regulatory overhaul because it would make their business safer and government oversight more predictable.
The oil industry reacted warily to the report, saying that companies with good safety records should not be subjected to costly new rules and warning that a major new set of regulations would slow production and drive up prices. Drillers also objected to a recommendation that the current $75 million cap on liability for accidents be raised by an unspecified amount.
Republicans in Congress have blocked any new rules for offshore drilling and new spending for regulation and have not acted on proposals to raise the liability cap. There is little sign that these will be high priorities when lawmakers reconvene.
But Mr. Graham said he believed that the horror of the accident and its aftermath would prove a powerful incentive to act this year. “I believe it will override an ideological preference for less government, less government intrusion, less cost,” he said. “This is not just government regulating private enterprises. This is government regulating lands and resources that the American people own.”
Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Tuesday that they would introduce legislation incorporating many of the commission’s recommendations, including raising the ceiling on damages. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said the Environment and Public Works Committee that she leads would begin to develop oil spill legislation that she hoped could win bipartisan support.
Two Republican House members, Doc Hastings of Washington, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, and Fred Upton of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told the panel that they would study its report and propose legislation if appropriate.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, “In keeping with the series of recommendations included in the commission report, our administration has already taken important steps to implement aggressive new reforms for the offshore oil and gas industry.”
Mr. Gibbs said the administration would take the panel’s additional recommendations into account as it adopted additional changes. “The mistakes and oversights by industry as well as government must not be repeated,” he said.
The 380-page report provides the most detailed official accounting yet of what went wrong aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the years of neglect of safety and environmental protection that preceded the April 20 blowout, which left 11 men dead and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The report is scathing in its indictment of the industry as failing to prepare adequate plans to respond to a major spill and of the government for decades of lax regulation of an industry that essentially operated without any meaningful federal oversight.
The report lays most of the blame for the accident on the three companies responsible for drilling the well: BP, Transocean and Halliburton. But the commissioners found what they described as “systemic” problems across the industry.
They recommended the creation of an industry-financed safety board and an independent monitoring office within the Department of Interior whose director serves a set term and is not answerable to the secretary.
The panel undertook its study without benefit of subpoena powers, under a tight deadline and without access to a number of critical components, like the well’s failed blowout preventer. Because of those flaws, the report leaves a number of mysteries, including why workers on the rig made the decisions they made before the explosion.
Questions unanswered in the report include why the blowout preventer failed and why workers on the rig failed to react to signs of rising gas in the well bore. Nor did the report address the potential culpability of executives of the three companies.
Other inquiries are continuing, including a Justice Department criminal and civil investigation. The companies face extensive private litigation by the families of the dead and injured and by hundreds of Gulf Coast business owners affected by the spill.
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