Saturday, May 22, 2010
To find out how much damage the Deepwater Horizon accident has caused the environment, experts are collecting water samples from the Gulf of Mexico for testing. But the federal government is requiring these samples be tested at one laboratory (TDI-Brooks International’s B&B Laboratories)—which does work for the petroleum industry, including BP, owner of the offshore oil platform that blew up and sank.
In addition to this potential conflict of interest, federal officials have mandated that BP gets to hire the companies that collect data as part of efforts to rescue wildlife covered with oil.
“Everywhere you look, if you look, you start seeing these conflicts of interest in how this disaster is getting handled,” said Taylor Kirschenfeld, a Florida environmental official who got a waiver to send his water samples to a different laboratory. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there is just too much overlap between these people.”
The New York Times also reported that a former BP official, Sylvia V. Baca, currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management in the Department of the Interior, giving her oversight of offshore drilling.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Conflict of Interest Worries Raised in Spill Tests (by Ian Urbina, New York Times)
Can a Lab Paid by BP Assess the Environmental Damage from the Gulf Oil Spill Without Bias? (by Bryan Rahija and Mandy Smithberger, Project on Government Oversight)
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