The Obama administration lagged in its initial response to the BP oil spill, played down spill projections, ultimately overreacted, and injected politics into the spill response, according to a report by President Obama’s own oil spill commission.
For close watchers of the oil spill – including millions of Americans, especially on the Gulf Coast – the preliminary findings of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling are hardly surprising, given the wall-to-wall coverage of and commentary about the almost three-month-long ordeal. Some 4.4 million barrels of oil (or about 184 million gallons) of light Louisiana crude spewed into the Gulf of Mexico before the Macondo well was capped on July 15.
The White House on Wednesday pushed back against the commission’s assertion that the administration response was either not competent or “not fully candid” with the American people. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tasked with assessing the damage, said in a statement, “The facts bear out that the federal response significantly mitigated the impact of the spill.”
Full Story: Oil spill report sketches anatomy of a flawed US response in Gulf – CSMonitor.com