St. Petersburg Times ^ | April 18, 2011 | Curtis Morgan and Lesley Clark, Miami Herald
Posted on Monday, April 18, 2011 6:05:31 AM by Cincinatus' Wife
One year later, the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history looks more and more like just a big bump in the road in the drive to drill deeper in the Gulf of Mexico and potentially closer to Florida's coastline.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 rig workers, spewed 60,000 barrels of oil a day for four months, cost five states billions of dollars in lost jobs and business, slimed marshes, beaches and wildlife from the Louisiana bayou to the Florida Panhandle, and left lingering toxic stains across complex food webs that scientists say will take years to recover.
A presidential commission report, issued in January, blamed just about every aspect of the offshore drilling industry — lapdog federal regulators, safety shortcuts by the British oil giant BP and its contractors and a high-risk "wildcat culture'' that pushed companies into more dangerous depths without capable backup containment options.
Yet...the political tide and public opinion seem to have shifted. One recent poll suggests growing support in Florida for drilling. A slew of proposals to tighten regulations or raise fees and fines on the industry have stalled in Congress. The Obama administration has slowly cracked open the gulf door but — a week before the April 20 anniversary of the explosion — a House committee passed three bills pushing faster and wider access.
"Some of the members of Congress are acting as though the Deepwater Horizon well oil spill never happened,'' Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters.
....In Washington, the Obama administration has adopted what Interior Secretary Salazar called a "thoughtful and deliberate approach'' to reopening the gulf, with a new oversight agency and new safety measures — notably, one mandating that the industry develop deep-water containment systems for worst-case blowouts, like the one that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon.
(Excerpt) Read more at tampabay.com ...
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