Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, facing Congress for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last month, said Tuesday that weaknesses at his agency’s Minerals Management Service may have contributed to the disaster. “We need to clean up that house,” he said in an appearance before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, referring to the minerals service.
Mr. Salazar said that the majority of the agency’s 1,700 employees were honest and capable but that there remained “a few bad apples.” He said that anyone found guilty of negligence or corruption would be rooted out.
The Obama administration has already announced that it will separate the minerals service’s conflicting functions of promoting offshore oil operations and regulating their safety and environmental compliance. Mr. Salazar said further steps would be needed to give federal oil regulators more resources, more independence and greater authority to police oil drilling operations.
The hearings came as scientists are carefully monitoring the currents in the Gulf of Mexico after warning that crude oil leaking from a blown well off the Louisiana coast was moving into an area where it could be swept toward the Florida Keys and the Atlantic Ocean within the next two weeks. The spread of oil could threaten coral reefs and hundreds of miles of additional shoreline.
On Tuesday, the Coast Guard said it was analyzing 20 tar balls that washed up Monday on the shores of Key West, at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, but it was not certain whether the tar could have come from the well that has been spewing oil since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank last month.
“We are trying to confirm where they came from,” said Mike Lutz, a spokesman for the Deepwater Horizon Response. Tar balls are a common occurrence along some Gulf Coast beaches, he added, and could come from the seabed as a result of previous, smaller spills.
Chuanmin Hu, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida, cautioned that “the likelihood that the tar ball comes from this oil spill is small.” He explained that the tar balls do not travel at the water’s surface, and that it could take longer for the tar to travel underwater than a floating slick would move.
“Everybody should be alerted, and we should keep our eyes widely open on the tar ball,” Dr. Hu said. “But at this moment we don’t have enough evidence to say it is from the spill.”
On Monday, government officials insisted that the oil had not yet entered the gulf’s loop current, which carries warm water in a vast clockwise motion from the Yucatán Peninsula into the northern Gulf of Mexico, then south to the Florida Keys and out into the Atlantic. They said they were continuing to monitor the movement of the spill closely.
But Dr. Hu and another independent scientist, analyzing ocean current and satellite data, said the oil was in an eddy that was quickly being drawn into the loop current, portending a much wider spread of the hazardous slick. Dr. Hu said that a team of scientists was planning to go into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday to analyze the currents.
Technicians from BP, the company that leased the drilling rig, said Tuesday they were continuing to use suction to capture oil from the well’s broken riser pipe, lying on the sea floor 5,000 feet below the surface. They are pulling oil out through a narrow tube at the rate of about 2,000 barrels a day — double the rate when the operation started on Sunday — according to the company’s Web site.
As workers prepared to do controlled burns and more skimming
of oil on the surface of the Gulf in favorable weather conditions on Tuesday, three hearings in Washington were trying to determine how the disaster could have happened — and be averted in the future.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico and chairman of the panel before which Mr. Salazar appeared, said he wanted to understand the apparent breakdown of federal oversight that may have been a factor leading to the accident, which continues to pour thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf every day.
“Along with the failure of technological systems, and failure by people who were responsible for those systems, regulatory failure is one of the three key interlocking breakdowns that I believe are at the heart of the problem,” Mr. Bingaman said.
Mr. Bingaman noted that there were a variety of changes in BP’s drilling plan, including removing the drilling mud, a protection against blowout, earlier than planned.
“These decisions can be driven by cost and the desire to make up lost time on a drilling project,” he said. “This raises the important question of where the M.M.S. was in this process — was it consulted, does it have an established role that assures it will scrutinize major changes to established plans.”
The Bingaman hearing was the first of three Senate hearings on the oil spill planned for Tuesday. Other senior administration officials involved in the oil spill response were to appear at afternoon sessions. The Senate Commerce Committee will feature Lamar McKay, chairman and president of BP America, and Steven Newman, the chief executive of Transocean.
At Monday’s hearings before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, defended the administration’s actions after the explosion, saying officials had engaged in an “all-hands-on-deck response to this event.”
Ms. Napolitano acknowledged, however, that the government was largely at BP’s mercy in stopping the leak and addressing much of the oil in the water.
“Frankly,” she said, “the federal government has limited capability and expertise in responding to wellhead incidents on the sea floor. Nonetheless, the federal government has mobilized scientists and industry experts to collaborate with BP to identify and execute the best strategies for sealing the well, and the president has tasked the Department of Energy to participate in providing any possible expertise on that front.”
Millions of gallons of oil have already escaped from the blown well, presenting an enormous challenge to contain it and keep it from killing ocean life and fouling Gulf Coast beaches and wetlands. That task will become immeasurably more difficult if the huge plume of oil mixed with water moves into the powerful loop current.
At present, little oil appears to have reached the loop current proper. Rear Adm. Mary E. Landry of the Coast Guard, one of the top officials overseeing the spill response, said at a briefing on Monday: “We know that the oil has not entered the loop current at this time. There may be some leading edge sheen that’s getting closer to the loop current, but this spill has not entered the loop current proper.”
But the independent scientists said that a portion of the wide oil slick is circulating in an eddy directly north of the loop current. This eddy, known as a cyclone, spins counterclockwise and is dragging the oil south.
“There is a very, very distinct trail of oil from the oil spill, all the way into this cyclone,” said Nan Walker, an oceanographer with the Earth Scan Laboratory at Louisiana State University. “So far, it looks like the oil is continuing to be dragged around the cyclone, but eventually it’s going to be mixed in with the loop current and make its way south to Florida.”
Dr. Hu said that the amount of oil entering the cyclone had increased sharply in the past few days.
“I see a huge oil plume being dragged in that direction,” he said. “It’s like a river.”
Dr. Hu estimated that oil that entered the current could reach the Florida Keys in roughly two weeks.
Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday in an interview on PBS’s “NewsHour”: “By the time the oil is in the loop current, it’s likely to be very, very diluted. And so it’s not likely to have a very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is.”
