US to punish oil spill culprits

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama called the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico “the greatest environmental disaster of its kind in our history” and said an independent commission will fully investigate its causes to make sure such a catastrophe won’t happen again. Regulations that need to be overhauled will be changed, and if laws were broken, those responsible will be prosecuted, the president said Tuesday after an Oval Office meeting with former Florida senator Bob Graham and former environmental protection agency administrator William Reilly, who are leading the investigative commission.

“We owe all those who’ve been harmed” a “full and vigorous accounting of the event that led to what has now become the worst oil spill in US history,” Obama said in the White House Rose Garden.

BP’s latest effort to plug the damaged oil well, resulting in the largest oil spill in US history, was deemed a failure over the weekend. The company fell 13% in London trading, the most since 1992.

Oil is leaking from the well 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf at a rate of as much as 19,000 barrels a day, and relief wells, the first of which is scheduled for completion in August, may be the best hope to stanch the leak, Carol Browner, Obama’s adviser on energy and climate change, said earlier Tuesday in a television interview. Obama said the environmental damage “could last for decades.”

The president vowed that government will keep pouring resources into the effort to stem environmental and economic damage from spill, which has already hit the coast of Louisiana and may hit the shores of Mississippi and Alabama this week. Obama said he will appoint five more members of the commission who will come from “leaders in science and engineering.”