GALLIANO, La (Reuters) – The US government piled pressure on BP Plc yesterday to clean up a “massive environmental mess” in the Gulf of Mexico, and a top official said fines would definitely be imposed on the energy giant for the spreading oil spill.
The company insisted it was doing all it could to try to seal a blown-out oil well spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons (litres) of oil into the Gulf every day, a disaster that threatens to become the worst US oil spill in history.
BP said it would make another attempt to plug the five-week-old leak tomorrow, but gave it only a 60-70 percent chance of success.
BP’s shares fell nearly 3 percent in London as investors waited to see whether BP’s latest attempt would work. The company has now lost about 25 percent of its market value — almost $50 billion — since the spill began. The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, said the government would “absolutely” levy fines on BP over the spill.
“There are certainly going to be opportunities for fines and penalties,” she told reporters.
With heavy oil already washing into fragile marshlands and wildlife refuges in Louisiana and threatening the livelihoods of Gulf coast residents, the US government is pushing BP to try to contain or seal the leak as soon as possible.
But, there appeared to be some signs of disagreement among US officials about just how aggressively the administration should be pressing BP over what President Barack Obama has called an unprecedented environmental catastrophe for the United States.
The administration’s response chief for the disaster, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, seemed to take issue with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s threat a day earlier to push BP “out of the way” if it did not do enough to stop the leak.
“To push BP out of the way would raise the question of ‘replace them with what?’“ Allen said at a White House news conference.
BP was “exhausting every technical means possible” to meet its legal responsibility to cap the well and contain the spreading oil, he said.
The company was on the defensive yesterday against the harsh criticism from the Obama administration. “I don’t know of anything else we could do, but if the government felt there were other things to do it is clearly within their power to do that,” BP Chief Operations Officer Doug Suttles told reporters.
The oil spill is a political hot potato for the Obama administration ahead of a November election that is widely expected to erode Democrats’ control of the US Congress. Analysts warn that voters may punish Democrats regardless of who is ultimately deemed responsible for the mess.
The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that 51 percent of Americans were unhappy with Obama’s handling of the spill that was sparked by an explosion on April 20. The poll was based on telephone interviews with just over 1,000 people between May 21-23.
The White House has repeatedly said it is the British energy giant’s responsibility to clean up the spill, but with public anger over BP’s handling of the crisis intensifying, there have been calls for the Obama administration to take charge.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has been critical of the federal government’s response, again called for more equipment, especially booms, to help stop the oil from making landfall. He said 70 miles (113 km) of his state’s coastline had been affected by the oil spill.
Louisiana’s marshes are nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish that make the state the top commercial seafood producer in the continental United States. Fishing is now banned in a large swath of the Gulf because of the spill.
