Gov't denying news access to public records

MOBILE, Ala. -- A month ago, as BP struggled to contain an oil spill that it estimated at 200,000 gallons a day, the Press-Register reported that the company's federal permit documents stated that it could handle a spill of 12.6 million gallons a day.

BP's documents also said that it could skim 17 million gallons of oil a day; thus far it has skimmed just 2 million gallons in seven weeks.

The documents -- BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan -- are riddled with inaccurate claims and errors, including an online address for an equipment supplier that instead links to an unrelated Japanese website.

In May, the newspaper asked the Department of Interior and the U.S. Minerals Management Service for the response plans of the five major companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, arguing that the public had an immediate need to know whether permits for other deepwater wells had been granted based on similarly flawed claims.

Neither federal agency would supply the plans without a Freedom of Information Act request, which the newspaper then filed.

The act, often identified as FOIA, requires the government to make available a wide range of public documents.

The Press-Register went further to ask for immediate access via an expedited FOIA request.

On June 8, federal officials denied the newspaper's request, stating that the agency did not see "an urgency to inform the public."

The newspaper, meanwhile, shared its original findings regarding BP's Regional Oil Spill Response Plan with two members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.

The committee then obtained the spill response plans from the Department of Interior. That committee has since begun hearings on the spill.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., has said that the plans for Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell Offshore Inc., and ExxonMobil were identical to the BP plan that the Press-Register reviewed. All were produced by same Houston-based company, and all contained similar outdated or incorrect information.

Asked Thursday why the Department of Interior did not view as urgent the public's need to see the various plans, Kendra Barkoff, spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar wrote, "The Presidential Commission and other reviews and investigations that are under way will help get to the bottom of what happened and what must be done to ensure that something like this never happens again.

"We have already begun to implement several immediate safety reforms and are working on others that we will be announcing soon," Barkoff wrote.

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