During the early weeks of the Gulf oil disaster, the White House suppressed attempts within the Obama administration to inform the public about how bad the spill might be—a move that undermined the public’s confidence in the government’s handling of the situation.

 

This assessment came from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, a panel that was put together by President Barack Obama.

 

According to the report, "The government appears to have taken an overly casual approach to the calculation and release of the 5,000 bbls/day estimate…”

 

According to a source who worked on the commission, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked the White House two weeks into the crisis for permission to make public its worst-case scenarios for the spill. The Office of Management and Budget denied the request.

 

White House officials have denied that they tried to suppress the NOAA information.

 

For at least a month after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sunk, the administration went along with BP’s prediction that only 5,000 barrels of oil a day was leaking from the broken well at the bottom of the Gulf. It later turned out that 62,000 barrels a day spewed in the early period, but that even towards the end of the crisis, the flow was 53,000 barrels a day, still far more than the rosy assurances offered by the government. Eventually, almost five million barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico. As much as half of this oil may still be in the water, buried on the seafloor of stuck as coastal areas as sludge.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Report: White House Squelched Release of BP Oil Spill Estimates (by Renee Schoof and Margaret Talev, McClatchy Newspapers)

Report Slams Administration for Underestimating Gulf Spill (by John Broder, New York Times)