Beleaguered oil agency chief quits
Source: Agencies |
May 28, 2010, Friday
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Print Edition
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INTERIOR Secretary Ken Salazar says the head of the troubled US agency that oversees offshore drilling has resigned.
Salazar announced the news yesterday at a congressional hearing where Minerals Management Service Director Elizabeth Birnbaum was to testify. She did not appear.
Birnbaum and her agency have endured scathing criticism in the weeks since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill over alleged lax oversight of drilling and what President Barack Obama has called an overly cozy relationship with industry.
Salazar said Birnbaum quit on her own terms and of her own volition.
Her departure came just hours before a news conference where Obama planned to address the spill and announce new safety protocols and an extension of a deepwater drilling moratorium.
It was a day of fast-moving developments in Washington and in the Gulf, where engineers worked with some apparent success to stanch the gushing leak five weeks into the catastrophe.
And after receiving the results of a 30-day safety review from Salazar, Obama also planned to delay controversial lease sales off the coast of Alaska and cancel entirely plans for drilling lease sales in the Western Gulf and off the coast of Virginia, according to a White House aide.
Meanwhile, up to 25,000 barrels (3.97 million liters) a day of oil is spewing from BP's Gulf well, the government estimated yesterday, meaning the spill has already far eclipsed the previous worst US oil spill, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster even as BP Plc wrestled to plug its gushing deepwater well.
US Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt said various teams examining the Gulf oil spill estimated the flow ranges from 12,000 barrels to 25,000 barrels per day.
McNutt heads up a panel of experts set up by the government to determine how much oil is flowing from the ruptured well. BP had previously estimated the spill rate since the well blew out in April at 5,000 barrels a day. BP declined immediate comment on the government's estimate of the oil spill flow rate.
In the previous worst US oil spill, in March 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez hit an undersea reef in Alaska, spilling a total of about 260,000 barrels of oil into the sea.
While Gulf Coast residents waited anxiously to see whether BP's latest effort to stem the flow would work, Obama was due to receive recommendations on how to prevent a repeat of the disaster that has soiled 160 kilometers of US coastline.
BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said a complex "top kill" operation that started on Wednesday to try to halt the seabed well's flow by pumping heavy drilling fluids into it was "moving the way we want it to." But BP had no immediate update to give on whether it has succeeded, a BP spokesman said yesterday.
Spokesman David Nicholas was responding to a Los Angeles Times report that had quoted a US Coast Guard admiral leading the oil spill response as saying the top kill procedure had succeeded in blocking the leak. "The top kill operation continues, there are no operational updates," Nicholas said.
Salazar announced the news yesterday at a congressional hearing where Minerals Management Service Director Elizabeth Birnbaum was to testify. She did not appear.
Birnbaum and her agency have endured scathing criticism in the weeks since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill over alleged lax oversight of drilling and what President Barack Obama has called an overly cozy relationship with industry.
Salazar said Birnbaum quit on her own terms and of her own volition.
Her departure came just hours before a news conference where Obama planned to address the spill and announce new safety protocols and an extension of a deepwater drilling moratorium.
It was a day of fast-moving developments in Washington and in the Gulf, where engineers worked with some apparent success to stanch the gushing leak five weeks into the catastrophe.
And after receiving the results of a 30-day safety review from Salazar, Obama also planned to delay controversial lease sales off the coast of Alaska and cancel entirely plans for drilling lease sales in the Western Gulf and off the coast of Virginia, according to a White House aide.
Meanwhile, up to 25,000 barrels (3.97 million liters) a day of oil is spewing from BP's Gulf well, the government estimated yesterday, meaning the spill has already far eclipsed the previous worst US oil spill, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster even as BP Plc wrestled to plug its gushing deepwater well.
US Geological Survey Director Marcia McNutt said various teams examining the Gulf oil spill estimated the flow ranges from 12,000 barrels to 25,000 barrels per day.
McNutt heads up a panel of experts set up by the government to determine how much oil is flowing from the ruptured well. BP had previously estimated the spill rate since the well blew out in April at 5,000 barrels a day. BP declined immediate comment on the government's estimate of the oil spill flow rate.
In the previous worst US oil spill, in March 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez hit an undersea reef in Alaska, spilling a total of about 260,000 barrels of oil into the sea.
While Gulf Coast residents waited anxiously to see whether BP's latest effort to stem the flow would work, Obama was due to receive recommendations on how to prevent a repeat of the disaster that has soiled 160 kilometers of US coastline.
BP Managing Director Robert Dudley said a complex "top kill" operation that started on Wednesday to try to halt the seabed well's flow by pumping heavy drilling fluids into it was "moving the way we want it to." But BP had no immediate update to give on whether it has succeeded, a BP spokesman said yesterday.
Spokesman David Nicholas was responding to a Los Angeles Times report that had quoted a US Coast Guard admiral leading the oil spill response as saying the top kill procedure had succeeded in blocking the leak. "The top kill operation continues, there are no operational updates," Nicholas said.
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