Federal records show steady stream of oil spills in gulf since 1964

The oil and gas industry's offshore safety and environmental record in the Gulf of Mexico has become a key point of debate over future drilling, but that record has been far worse than is commonly portrayed by many industry leaders and lawmakers. Many policymakers think that the record before the BP oil spill was exemplary. In a House hearing Thursday, Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, "It's almost an astonishingly safe, clean history that we have there in the gulf." Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the industry's "history of safety over all of those times" had provided the "empirical foundation" for U.S. policy. But federal records tell a different story. They show a steady stream of oil spills dumping 517,847 barrels of petroleum -- which would fill an equivalent number of standard American bathtubs -- into the Gulf of Mexico between 1964 and 2009. The spills killed thousands of birds and soiled beaches as far away as Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Altogether, they poured twice as much as oil into U.S. waters as the Exxon Valdez tanker did when it ran aground in 1989. The industry's record had been improving before the BP spill. In 2009, the largest one was about 1,500 barrels, about what BP's damaged well was leaking every hour before it was capped last week...more