Interior secretary admits lax oil regulation

May 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Grilled by skeptical lawmakers, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday acknowledged his agency had been lax in overseeing offshore-drilling activities and that may have 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.

His appearances before two of the three Senate panels conducting 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.

Government scientists were anxiously surveying the Gulf to determine if the oil had entered a powerful current that could take it to Florida and eventually up the East Coast. Tar balls that washed up on Florida’s Key West were shipped to a Coast Guard laboratory in Connecticut to determine if they came from the Gulf spill.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen told the Senate Commerce Committee the growing size and scattershot nature of the oil spill was creating “severe challenges” in containing it and cleaning it up.