Independent Inquiry Into Oil Spill Is Urged

Independent Inquiry Into Oil Spill Is Urged
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/15/us/politics/15inquire.html?th&emc=th


WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration moves to end a conflict-of-interest problem in the operation of the Minerals Management Service, a rising chorus of experts is demanding that it rectify a similar conflict and appoint an independent blue-ribbon commission to investigate the gulf spill.

The government’s main effort to get at the root causes of the April 20 oil rig explosion and spill is led by a six-member Board of Inquiry that has been holding hearings this week in Kenner, La.

Working in a bland hotel reception room, it has been questioning witnesses about the actions of every entity connected to the accident, from BP to Transocean to the Coast Guard to the Minerals Management Service, which both advances and regulates offshore drilling. But three of that panel’s members work for the minerals service, and the other three work for the Coast Guard.

Democratic lawmakers have introduced parallel measures in the House and the Senate proposing that a distinguished independent commission investigate the spill. And experts with long experience in investigating accidents are echoing their calls, saying that however honest or well-intentioned each internal investigator may be, no agency can effectively judge its own role in contributing to an accident.

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and a sponsor of the Senate bill, said if the investigation is left to the agencies themselves, crucial information might be “withheld, skewed or destroyed before the public can consume it.”

The White House said Friday that it would review proposals for such a commission.

While federal agencies often investigate accidents in areas they regulate, experts in fields like airline and nuclear safety say that in a major disaster, such an inquiry cannot objectively size up government missteps.

The Coast Guard and the minerals service “have a vested interest in how this comes out, in terms of what it does to their reputation and perhaps their own future,” said Steven B. Wallace, an aviation safety consultant.

“This is such a colossal event, with such economic and social impact, that perhaps it would be appropriate to look at a commission of unimpeachable credentials, more unimpeachable for their integrity than their technical expertise,” he said.

Representative James L. Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed a similar view of the Board of Inquiry’s role. “There has to be something else,” he said. “On the face of it, this does not appear to be appropriate.”

Mr. Oberstar, Democrat of Minnesota, said that as a young Congressional aide in the 1960s he helped draft the legislation that established an independent agency for looking into plane crashes, the National Transportation Safety Board. Previously all air crashes were investigated by the Department of Transportation. But in a plane crash, the Department of Transportation itself is always at issue. It regulates the design and construction of airplanes and airports as well as the training of pilots and operates the air traffic control system, all of which can come into play in a air accident.

The inquiry under way in Kenner, near the New Orleans airport, is nonetheless ordained by federal law. The Coast Guard routinely convenes boards of inquiry in cases involving loss of life or major economic damage.

It invited the minerals service to take part precisely because of its regulatory authority: it is in charge of leasing out offshore tracts, collecting royalties owed to the government and regulating the safety of the operations.

This week, the Obama administration announced that it would divide up the minerals agency to separate the job of promoting offshore drilling from the job of regulating it. But the administration has not made any move to supersede the Board of Inquiry’s investigation.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, whose department includes the minerals service, has asked the National Academy of Engineering to evaluate the oil spill, but that group will focus mostly on technical failures.

Mr. Wallace, the aviation consultant, has found himself on both sides of the internal inquiry dilemma. In 2008, he retired as head of an accident investigation office at the Federal Aviation Administration, part of the Transportation Department. While the F.A.A. routinely looks into air crashes, final investigative authority rests with the National Transportation Safety Board, particularly when an accident involves loss of life.

Mr. Wallace was also a member of the special board that investigated the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated in 2003 while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Congress and the Bush administration did not expect NASA to be capable of investigating itself.

Another prominent example is the Kemeny Commission, which President Jimmy Carter created to investigate the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pa. It was led by John G. Kemeny, president of Dartmouth College.

Bruce E. Babbitt, who served on that commission, suggested that it would be a useful model for the current environmental crisis. “It’s O.K. to have an in-house inquiry, but that, by its very design, is inadequate,” said Mr. Babbitt, who was governor of Arizona when he was named to the commission.

He said the Kemeny Commission had studied the culture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a way that the agency could not have itself. It found major shortcomings that helped lead to changes in safety procedures in nuclear reactors.

Giving Mr. Babbitt further perspective, he served as secretary of the interior, the parent of the minerals service. “We’re never going to really get lasting and important change without the president appointing a national commission, which needs to be a mix of experts, of industry people and of regulators,” he said.

Dan W. Reicher, a staff member on the Kemeny Commission and later an assistant energy secretary, said one lesson from his role in that inquiry was that “we can’t rely on agencies investigating themselves.”

“A federal agency charged with regulating safety and health generally doesn’t have the independence from its day-to-day operations to fully investigate a major accident at a facility it oversees,” Mr. Reicher said.

A senior Congressional investigator who asked not to be named because his committee does not have jurisdiction over oil spills said the BP case cried out for an independent investigator for yet another reason. “Somebody ought to be freezing the evidence right now,” he said.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Kenner, La.