BP Oil Spill Confirmed as Worst in US History

Although President Obama has extended the moratorium on new deepwater drilling permits for six months and halted operations at thirty-three deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico, some oil rigs are continuing their operations. The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit to halt forty-nine offshore drilling plans in the Gulf of Mexico that were approved without full environmental review. Meanwhile, the group Food & Water Watch is leading an effort to shut down the Atlantis, another BP oil rig in the Gulf. The group warns an oil spill from the Atlantis could be many times larger than the current spill and even harder to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by two guests in San Francisco. Wenonah Hauter is executive director of Food & Water Watch, and Miyoko Sakashita is the oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

Wenonah Hauter, let’s begin with you. Your response to President Obama going to the Gulf, what you think needs to happen right now? 

WENONAH HAUTER: Well, the first thing that needs to happen is that the BP Atlantis platform needs to be shut down before we have another accident. For the last year, we’ve been trying to get MMS to act on this, and we now believe that it’s President Obama who needs to take action in shutting down this very dangerous platform. We filed suit last week against MMS, demanding that the platform be shut down. And we’re asking people to go to the website spillthetruth.org and ask President Obama to shut it down immediately. 

AMY GOODMAN: Just one minute on this issue of Atlantis. I don’t think most people realize that these oil—deep sea oil drilling sites are continuing now, as they talk about moratoriums and the closings of, shutting down of these in the Gulf of Mexico. Wenonah Hauter, where is the Atlantis deep sea oil drilling rig? 

WENONAH HAUTER: The Atlantis is 150 miles offshore from New Orleans, and it’s 7,000 feet deep. So it’s much deeper than the Horizon. And none of the safety documentation has been verified. So we’re very concerned that there could be an accident at any time. 

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of this particular platform’s importance to the general Gulf oil production, how big is it? And why is there such a resistance to looking at it? 

WENONAH HAUTER: Well, it produces 8.4 million gallons of oil every day. And so, if there were to be a spill, it would be five—it could be five times larger than the Horizon spill within five days. And the thing is that we have a lot of evidence about what’s going on with BP Atlantis because of a whistleblower, but we suspect that this is the case with all of the deepwater platforms. And it’s one of the reasons that we’re calling on President Obama to also order an independent investigation of the safety documentation for all deepwater platforms and to also—we believe that there needs to be a new agency created to actually regulate the deepwater platforms and the oil industry, because MMS, even as it is broken up, with its entrenched staff, is not likely to do a better job. 

AMY GOODMAN: So what does it mean when President Obama, in the statement we ran of Obama’s just a minute ago, say when he says, "And four, we will suspend action on thirty-three deepwater exploratory wells currently being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico," "we will continue the existing moratorium," as well? 

WENONAH HAUTER: Well, what that means is that they’re talking about wells that will be drilled. They’re not talking about the existing platforms. And we think that MMS, at best, is dysfunctional and incompetent, and at worst, has been willfully complicit with the oil industry. And there’s every likelihood that the safety documents that are missing from BP Atlantis—and that’s 6,000 out of the 7,000 documents—that this is probably the case with other platforms and that there needs to be an immediate and serious investigation, not just talk.