Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, 1 year has passed since the Deepwater Horizon accident. Yet BP, Transocean, Halliburton, and Cameron continue to argue in court which of them deserves more blame for the 11 deaths and environmental devastation.

BP continues to fight the estimates of the amount of oil spilled in order to minimize its liability. And more than 1 year after the beginning of this disaster, Congress has still not passed any legislation to improve the safety of offshore drilling and ensure that the lessons of the BP spill are incorporated into future drilling.

The co-chairs of the independent BP commission have testified before the Natural Resources Committee that the accident could have been prevented, and the commission found that the root causes of the disaster were systemic to the entire industry. Their extensive reports documented numerous specific failures of the cementing, well design and testing and maintenance associated with the Deepwater Horizon well.

And recently, the Department of the Interior's contractor, Det Norske Veritas, released its report on the forensic investigation of the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer, and here's what they found: the results indicated that the drilling pipe inside of the blowout preventer had buckled due to the force of the blowout; and the cutting devices, therefore, couldn't fully sever the drill pipe and seal off the well.

According to the forensic report, contrary to the claims of the oil industry that blowout preventers are fail-safe devices, it seems unclear whether blowout preventers can actually prevent major blowouts at all once they are underway.

But here we are today with the Republicans bringing out legislation that has no meaningful safety protections for the industry.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. MARKEY. I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, here is the BP Blue Ribbon Commission report that was conducted to investigate and to make recommendations as to what the causes were and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. Right now, nothing that is in this report has been implemented in terms of legislation here on the House floor. So I will tell you what my bill does. It will require multiple lines of defense against a blowout and ensures that these defenses are redundant so that failure of one does not lead to cascading failures of the entire system as occurred with BP's Macondo well.

First, the amendment sets minimum standards for blowout preventers, including a requirement that blowout preventers operate as intended even when the force of an ongoing blowout shifts the drill pipe out of position.

The amendment also requires new standards on safe well design and cementing to ensure multiple redundant barriers within the well against uncontrolled oil or gas blow that could lead to a blowout.

The amendment also requires independent third-party certification of blowout preventers and well designs.

Finally, the language ensures that if the Department of the Interior finds by some other measures that it has or may one day require would provide an even higher level of safety, that the Secretary can substitute those better alternatives instead.

This is the direction we should be heading in.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the remaining time.

I agree with the gentleman from Louisiana; I am not an expert on drilling. We are congressional experts. And that is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, like ``jumbo shrimp'' or ``Salt Lake City night life.'' There is no such thing. We rely upon real experts.

Here are the real experts: The Blue Ribbon Commission put together to study what went wrong and what needs to be done, and that is what my amendment will do. My amendment is very close to the legislation that passed 48-0 out of the Commerce Committee last year and was later adopted by the House. So all we are doing is just reflecting what all of these experts recommended and were finally incorporated.

So we can ignore the experts, but then we roll the dice. And, once again, a part of our coastline could be held hostage to an oil company that was trying to save money but at risk of endangering the lives and the livelihood of millions of people off of the coastline off of our country.

I urge an ``aye'' vote for the Markey amendment.

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