Obama arrives in Gulf for oil disaster update

Washington (News Today) - President Obama said Monday that federal officials are "gathering up facts" to help ensure that embattled oil giant BP fairly compensates people and businesses suffering losses as a result of the growing Gulf oil disaster.

The president made his remarks while visiting Mississippi's Gulf Coast at the start of a pivotal week in the federal response to the spill. He later visited a relief staging facility in Theodore, Alabama, and was scheduled to spend the night in Pensacola, Florida.

Obama was scheduled to visit the Gulf states affected by the spill on Monday and Tuesday, followed by an address to the nation on Tuesday night and a highly anticipated meeting with BP officials on Wednesday. Congress, meanwhile, prepared to grill top oil executives this week, including embattled BP chief Tony Hayward.

Read more about the president's visit

Federal authorities are jacking up the pressure on BP to start containing the spill more effectively, as well as to compensate Gulf residents and businesses harmed by the oil.

Obama said Monday he wants to be sure "we have an absolutely clear understanding about how we can best present to BP the need to make sure that individuals and businesses are dealt with in a fair and ... prompt manner."

The president's visit to the Gulf region is his fourth since the disaster began April 20.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton noted Monday that BP expects to be able to contain 50,000 barrels of now-gushing oil per day by the end of June. He also said the White House is confident that it has the legal authority to force BP to set up an escrow account for the purpose of paying damages.

David Axelrod, the senior adviser to Obama, recently said the plan would call for an independent third party to handle the claims process.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, along with most other Senate Democrats, sent a letter to Hayward on Monday, urging the company to set aside $20 billion for the purposes of covering both economic damages and Gulf cleanup costs.

"While we are pleased that BP has admitted liability for these damages and vowed to provide full remuneration for economic losses and clean-up costs, history has taught us that corporations often fail to live up to their initial promises," the senators said in the letter.

As the president and Congress push to accelerate the oil spill containment and compensation process, however, BP is still struggling to pinpoint how much oil is gushing into the ocean.

BP started to deploy pressure sensors on its ruptured undersea well in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday in an effort to fine-tune estimates of what is now the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Read more about the sensors

BP used remote-controlled submarines to begin positioning the sensors inside the well, located 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf, company spokesman Mark Proegler said. The sensors were requested by federal experts who have been trying to gauge how much oil has been pouring from the well, which experts say could have been spewing as much as 1.7 million gallons a day into the Gulf.

But Proegler said the devices may not yield accurate information for several days.

"It's not as if they'll plug these sensors in and get readings right away," he said.

Researchers recently doubled estimates of how much oil has been flowing from the ruptured well, saying last week that up to 40,000 barrels -- or 1.7 million gallons -- a day may have leaked for weeks. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the Obama administration's point man on the disaster, said the sensors will help give those researchers a better picture of the flow rate.

Because of this, Allen's deputy, Rear Adm. James Watson, gave BP until Sunday to provide alternative plans that adequately address substantially higher rates of oil flow. In response, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told Watson that the company had devised a strategy to contain up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day by mid-July, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

Read the letter from BP to Watson (PDF)

The revised plan -- which aims for a maximum containment of slightly over 50,000 barrels per day by the end of June -- was submitted two weeks earlier than originally suggested by BP, according to an administration official.

The administration "has continuously demanded strategies and responses from BP that fit the realities of this catastrophic event, for which BP is responsible," the official said. "We will continue to hold BP accountable and bring every possible resource and innovation to bear."

Adding to the pressure on BP: a letter released Monday to Hayward from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-California, stating that a congressional investigation indicates the company took a low-cost, speedy approach to drilling the broken deepwater well responsible for the growing spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"[Our] investigation is raising serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion" that created the spill, Waxman said in the letter.

"On April 15, five days before the explosion, BP's drilling engineer called [the facility in the Gulf] a 'nightmare well.' "

Hayward is scheduled to testify before Waxman's committee on Thursday.

Oil is believed to have been pouring into the Gulf since the April 20 explosion that sank the offshore drill rig Deepwater Horizon, killing 11 workers. The spill now dwarfs the 11 million gallons that were dumped into Alaska's Prince William Sound when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and oil in varying amounts and consistencies has hit the shores of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Source : CNN

Posted in: