Oil spill estimates squelched, panel says

WASHINGTON – Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could get, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case models public, a report by the staff of the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday.

White House officials denied that they tried to suppress the information.

The allegation was made by unnamed government officials cited in a staff working paper released Wednesday by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. Although not a final report, it could raise questions over whether the Obama administration tried to minimize the extent of the BP oil spill, the worst man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history.

The staff paper said that underestimating the flow rates “undermined public confidence in the federal government’s response” by creating the impression that the government was either incompetent or untrustworthy. The paper said that the loss of trust “fuels public fears.”

In a separate report, the commission’s staff concluded that despite the Coast Guard’s insistence that it was always responding to the worst-case scenario, the failure to have an accurate flow rate slowed the response and lulled Obama administration officials into a false belief that the spill would be controlled easily.

The first report said that the “decision to withhold worst-case discharge figures” may have been made at a high level. It said that in late April or early May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “wanted to make public some of its long-term, worst-case discharge models for the Deepwater Horizon spill, and requested approval to do so from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Staff was told that the Office of Management and Budget denied NOAA’s request.”

A joint statement from the OMB and NOAA released Wednesday said that the OMB had been tapped “to coordinate and review all interagency materials developed in response to the BP oil spill.”

OMB spokesman Kenneth Baer said that the discussions between the OMB and NOAA weren’t focused on the flow rate, but dealt more broadly with NOAA’s modeling for the spill’s long-term shoreline impact. Baer said that the OMB made no attempt to shield the public from the worst-case flow rate scenario.

“The issue was the modeling, the science and the assumptions they were using to come up with their analysis. Not public relations or presentation. We offered them suggestions of ways to improve it and they happily accepted it,” Baer said.

But the oil flow rate was part of those models.

Baer also noted that officials in some instances talked about a possible 100,000-barrel worst-case daily amount.

The commission said in a statement that it didn’t consider the government’s response a contradiction of its report.

The government’s final estimate, on Aug. 2, was that 62,000 barrels a day leaked in the early period, but that flow declined to 53,000 barrels a day by the time the well was capped on July 15.

The report noted that retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s top official on the disaster, and other officials said in news conferences that the government prepared for a worst-case scenario from the beginning and didn’t base decisions about what equipment would be needed on the early estimates of 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day.

However, it said, the government withheld the figures of what “worst-case” meant.

The second report noted that only after NOAA determined that the flow rate was five times what BP had first estimated did the Obama administration declare the spill an incident of national significance.

“For the first 10 days of the spill, it appears that a sense of over-optimism affected responders,” the second report said. “At least one high-level Coast Guard official thought that the oil would not come ashore.”