Today in oil spill news:
BP’s internal probe into the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon has found that the company’s engineers misinterpreted pressure data warning of a blowout, Bloomberg reports. The full report has not yet been made public, however.
The New York Times weighs in in support of the BP Gulf Fund and its administrator, Ken Feinberg. Feinberg also talked to the Southern Governors’ Association annual meeting about the claims process.
The Telegraph reports that BP will admit to spending $1 million a week on television and radio advertisements to promote the company post-spill. The figure comes in response to a congressional inquiry.
The co-chair of the oil spill commission expressed frustration with the fact that the Senate still has not approved legislation granting the panel the power of subpoena. “I wish they would give us subpoena authority and hope that they do that as soon as they come back from recess,” said William Reilly on Platts Energy Week.
While everyone was paying attention to the Gulf disaster, a BP refinery released 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals—including benzene, a carcinogen benzene—in Texas City, Texas over the course of 40 days, making a number of residents sick.
From President Obama’s speech on the fifth anniversary of Katrina on Sunday: “[W]e will continue to rely on sound science, carefully monitoring waters and coastlines as well as the health of the people along the Gulf, to deal with any long-term effects of the oil spill. We are going to stand with you until the oil is cleaned up, until the environment is restored, until polluters are held accountable, until communities are made whole, and until this region is all the way back on its feet.”
