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Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Investigative Panel Faults Obama Response to BP Oil Spill

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration's response to the BP PLC oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was affected by "a sense of over optimism" about the disaster that "may have affected the scale and speed with which national resources were brought to bear," the staff of a special commission investigating the disaster found.

In four papers issued Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, commission investigators fault the administration for making inaccurate public statements about a report on the fate of oil spilled by a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The paper faults the administration for taking "an overly casual approach" in calculating, during the spill's second week, that between 1,000 and 5,000 barrels of oil were flowing in to the Gulf.

That estimate—which the government later revised to between between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day—was based on a one-page document prepared by a government scientist within six days of the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig, according to a commission staff paper. - WSJ Story

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