Offshore Oil Industry Regulation to be Tightened
By H. Josef Herbert and Frederic Frommer
Juneau Empire
May 19, 2010
WASHINGTON - Grilled by skeptical lawmakers, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday acknowledged his agency had been lax in overseeing offshore drilling activities and that contributed to the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"There will be tremendous lessons to be learned here," Salazar told a Senate panel in his first appearance before Congress since the April 20 blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Describing pending reforms in the Interior Department, Salazar cited a "collective responsibility" for the spill that included the federal agency he manages.
His appearances before two of the three Senate panels holding hearings Tuesday on the giant oil spill came as federal officials kept a wary eye on the expanding dimensions of the problem. The government increased the area of the Gulf where fishing is shut down to 46,000 square miles, or about 19 percent of federal waters. That's up from about 7 percent before.
