Independent Inquiry Into Oil Spill Is Urgedsnip
A rising chorus of experts is demanding ..... an independent blue-ribbon commission to investigate the gulf spill. The government’s main effort to get at the root causes of the April 20 oil rig explosion and spill is led by a six-member Board of Inquiry that has been holding hearings this week in Kenner, La. Working in a bland hotel reception room, it has been questioning witnesses about the actions of every entity connected to the accident, from BP to Transocean to the Coast Guard to the Minerals Management Service, which both advances and regulates offshore drilling.
But three of that panel’s members work for the minerals service, and the other three work for the Coast Guard. Democratic lawmakers have introduced parallel measures in the House and the Senate proposing that a distinguished independent commission investigate the spill. And experts with long experience in investigating accidents are echoing their calls, saying that however honest or well-intentioned each internal investigator may be, no agency can effectively judge its own role in contributing to an accident. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and a sponsor of the Senate bill, said if the investigation is left to the agencies themselves, crucial information might be “withheld, skewed or destroyed before the public can consume it.”
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The Coast Guard and the minerals service “have a vested interest in how this comes out, in terms of what it does to their reputation and perhaps their own future,” said Steven B. Wallace, an aviation safety consultant.
“This is such a colossal event, with such economic and social impact, that perhaps it would be appropriate to look at a commission of unimpeachable credentials, more unimpeachable for their integrity than their technical expertise,” he said. Representative James L. Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed a similar view of the Board of Inquiry’s role. “There has to be something else,” he said. “On the face of it, this does not appear to be appropriate.”
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Giving Mr. Babbitt further perspective, he served as secretary of the interior, the parent of the minerals service. “We’re never going to really get lasting and important change without the president appointing a national commission, which needs to be a mix of experts, of industry people and of regulators,” he said.
Dan W. Reicher, a staff member on the Kemeny Commission and later an assistant energy secretary, said one lesson from his role in that inquiry was that “we can’t rely on agencies investigating themselves.”
A federal agency charged with regulating safety and health generally doesn’t have the independence from its day-to-day operations to fully investigate a major accident at a facility it oversees,” Mr. Reicher said.
A senior Congressional investigator who asked not to be named because his committee does not have jurisdiction over oil spills said the BP case cried out for an independent investigator for yet another reason. “Somebody ought to be freezing the evidence right now,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/us/politics/15inquire.html?ref=politics***************************************************************
Interior Dept Let BP drill with No Permits, and No Environmental Impact Studies:
and new drilling permits issued since the spill:Aside from allowing BP and other companies to drill in the gulf without getting the required permits from NOAA, the minerals agency has also given BP and other drilling companies in the gulf blanket exemptions from having to provide environmental impact statements. snip
Tensions between scientists and managers at the agency erupted in one case last year involving a rig in the gulf called the BP Atlantis. An agency scientist complained to his bosses of catastrophic safety and environmental violations. The scientist said these complaints were ignored, so he took his concerns to higher officials at the Interior Department.
“The purpose of this letter is to restate in writing our concern that the BP Atlantis project presently poses a threat of serious, immediate, potentially irreparable and catastrophic harm to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and its marine environment, and to summarize how BP’s conduct has violated federal law and regulations,” Kenneth Abbott, the agency scientist, wrote in a letter to officials at the Interior Department that was dated May 27.
The letter added: “From our conversation on the phone, we understand that M.M.S. is already aware that undersea manifolds have been leaking and that major flow lines must already be replaced. Failure of this critical undersea equipment has potentially catastrophic environmental consequences.”
Almost two months before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, sent a letter to the agency raising concerns about the BP Atlantis and questioning its oversight of the rig.
After the disaster, Mr. Salazar said he would delay granting any new oil drilling permits.
But the minerals agency has issued at least five final approval permits to new drilling projects in the gulf since last week, records show.
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new drilling permits issued since the spill:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/14agency/4_APD-Query-Search-Results.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14agency.html?pagewanted=2&ref=politics
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