Twenty-one US Senate Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders (Vt.) expressed their opposition to what they said are Trump administration plans to roll back offshore blowout preventer (BOP) system and well control regulations imposed following the 2010 Macondo well’s destruction and subsequent massive crude oil spill.
“The move by your department to undermine these protections is endangering the lives of oil workers, posing a serious threat to the environment, and imposing enormous potential liability on taxpayers by ignoring safety,” they said in a July 18 letter to US Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke.
The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) announced the proposed changes, which were published in the Federal Register on May 11, in late April (OGJ Online, Apr. 27, 2018). On July 5, it extended the original 60-day comment period on the proposal to Aug. 6.
“It is immensely concerning that the initial Regulatory Impact Analysis found that reducing safety requirements somehow ‘would not negatively impact worker safety or the environment,’” Maria E. Cantwell (D-Wash.), the Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s ranking minority member, and the other senators said in their letter.
“More troubling than that faulty logic, [BSEE] should be focused on increasing worker safety and environmental enforcement instead of trying to develop rules that provide no improvement to safety or the environment,” they told Zinke.
Rolling back such critical protections would not only be irresponsible, but dangerous, the senators asserted. “Instead of throwing out commonsense safeguards, we should be working to incorporate more lessons learned from tragedies like [this] to improve safety, oil spill prevention, and response,” they said in their letter.
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