Lawmakers Clash Over Government Responsibility for BP Spill

20th Jul 2010 16:15

By Siobhan Hughes Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Republicans and Democrats clashed Tuesday over government responsibility for the BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) oil spill, as officials who oversaw offshore drilling starting in the Bush administration prepared to testify before Congress and defend their oversight of the oil industry. Rep. Bart Stupak (D, Mich.) criticized former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who served in the Bush administration, saying that regulations finalized during her tenure failed to include key protections, such as requiring failsafe devices known as blowout preventers to have backup equipment to shut off wells. Rep. Michael Burgess (R, Texas) countered that the BP disaster stemmed from failure to follow existing regulations, "not that George W. Bush prevented a second set of shear rams." "The Department of Interior under both President Bush and President Obama made serious mistakes," concluded Rep. Henry Waxman (D, Calif.) the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, at a hearing. "The cop on the beat was off duty for nearly a decade, and this gave rise to a dangerous culture of permissiveness." The hearing is the first to focus exclusively on the role of regulators in the period leading up to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Former Interior secretaries Gale Norton and Dirk Kempthorne, who served under the Bush administration, will testify. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will testify on a second panel. Kempthorne, who led Interior in the final years of the Bush administration, will say that BP won regulatory approval to go ahead with its Macondo well under the Obama administration, "after I left Interior," according to the text of prepared remarks. Kempthorne will say that "all of us"--from both the Bush and Obama administrations--had the same assumptions about offshore drilling and "never contemplated an accident of this magnitude could ever happen." And he will take a shot at Congress and the news media for failing to raise warnings. "I don't ever recall concerns raised at my confirmation hearing or in my subsequent testimonies before Congress or in reports from the inspector general or from the news media that an oil spill of this magnitude could occur," Kempthorne will say. "I recall being pointedly asked during congressional hearings why Interior wasn't doing more to expand offshore energy development, not less. In part this concern was driven by then soaring $4 a gallon gasoline prices." Waxman kicked off the hearing, noting that Kempthorne oversaw the sale of a lease to BP that it used to drill the now-broken well. Kempthorne also "oversaw the deeply flawed assessment of potential environmental impacts associated with this lease sale, an assessment that did not anticipate the possibility or impacts of a catastrophic subsea blowout," Waxman said. "As a result, BP did not have to include an oil spill response discussion, a site-specific oil spill response plan, or a blowout scenario in its exploration plan." Citing news reports, Norton will say in prepared testimony that "it appears that decisions made by BP in the last days and hours before the blowout were the primary cause of the blowout." She will say that regulations on blowout preventers and cementing processes adopted on her watch--which Stupak criticized--were studied to "provide the scientific and engineering basis to determine whether the rules were adequately protective." The current Interior chief, Salazar, will recite a list of his initiatives, including gaining more money for inspectors at the Interior agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service and terminating a program that allows oil companies to pay for oil and natural gas taken from public lands with oil and gas instead of with cash. The royalty-in-kind program became embroiled in a scandal after an inspector general uncovered a cozy relationship between regulators and the oil industry. "But there is little evidence that these reforms changed the laissez-faire approach of MMS in regulating the BP well," Waxman said. "MMS approved the drill plan and changes to the well design that we have questioned during our investigation," Waxman said. -Siobhan Hughes; Dow Jones Newswires; (202) 862-6654; [email protected] (END) Dow Jones Newswires July 20, 2010 11:15 ET (15:15 GMT)