Durbin, Emanuel Call on BP to Publicly Commit to Protecting the Great Lakes

Letter

Following their meeting with President of BP America Robert A. Malone in early September, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) sent a letter calling on BP to advertise its intention to operate under the old dumping permit as public commitment to protecting the Great Lakes. Today, Emanuel and Durbin reiterated their call for BP to publicly commit to the Great Lakes.

The text of the letter appears below:

Dear Mr. Malone,

We write to follow up on our letter of September 12, 2007, regarding our September meeting on BP's decision to stay within the old wastewater effluent permit limits as you move forward with the expansion of the Whiting, Indiana refinery. We have not received a response from your office and want to reiterate our recommendation that BP communicates clearly to the public its intention to operate under the limitations of the previous permit. Just as your company ran full page ads explaining your position prior to this decision, we hope that a public expression of BP's commitment to protecting the Great Lakes will be forthcoming.

As we discussed in our meeting and mentioned in our previous letter, since your company does not intend to amend the NPDES permit or otherwise codify plans to operate under the previous permit, we urge you to consider a public declaration to show BP's public commitment to protecting the Great Lakes.

We look forward to hearing from you soon, and we hope to soon see a public disclosure of BP's commitment to its plan for containing pollution from the Whiting facility and protecting the Great Lakes.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Durbin
U.S. Senator

Rahm Emanuel
Member of Congress

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