British Petroleum says it will publicly release a live feed of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico following demands from Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
British Petroleum says it will publicly release a live feed of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico following demands from Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The link, expected to be released today, will be posted on the committee's Web site at www.globalwarming.house.gov.
"BP is going to have to pay for the cleanup of this spill and the long-term damage. Hosting this video on our website is the only freebie they're going to get," Rep. Markey says in a press release on his Web site.
Yesterday, Markey conducted a briefing with independent scientists trying to garner more information on exactly how much oil is spilling into the Gulf. BP has estimated that 5,000 barrels of oil are leaking daily into the Gulf (an insertion tube successfully installed by BP is now collecting . However, since the company released some video footage of the leak last week, independent experts have disputed that figure, estimating that the real size of the spill could be as much as 70,000 barrels a day.
"This may be BP's footage, but it's America's ocean," Markey adds. "Now anyone will be able to see the real-time effects the BP spill is having on our ocean. This footage will aid analysis by independent scientists blocked by BP from coming to see the spill. This is 4th grade math. We know the numerator here-the couple thousand barrels a day BP is siphoning out of the sunken pipe. But we still don't know the denominator. BP is capturing a fraction of the oil, but they don't know what that fraction is. By releasing this video, we've taken the first step towards allowing better access to the information BP has about this spill."