On the recordOctober 11, 2011
As the Senator from Arizona is in the back of the Chamber, I just want to say this Senator appreciates his long public service and his dedication to this country. Mr. President, as one of the Senators from a State that borders the Gulf of Mexico, naturally we have been quite concerned in the followup to the Deepwater Horizon oilspill. You will remember that was an oilspill that at first BP said: Oh, it was only 1,000 barrels a day. It was not until Senator Boxer, the chairman of the environment committee, and I were able to wrangle the actual streaming video from 5,000 feet below the surface and put it up on my Web site that the scientists could then calculate how much oil was coming out. It was not anywhere close to 1,000 barrels a day. In fact, it ended up being 50,000 barrels of oil a day that was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result of that total number of days, almost 5 million barrels of oil has gushed into the gulf, we can expect some serious economic and environmental consequences and particularly the consequences on the critters. It is hard to go down to 5,000 feet and get data, because of the pressure there, about what is happening to the critters. But we have an opportunity to find out what is happening by where all that oil seeped in toward shore, onto the beaches and into the estuaries. Of course, the estuaries that were closest to the oil spill were the ones along the coastline of Louisiana and a lot of those marshes.…
