Report finds 'alarming unaddressed deficiencies' in US offshore oil drilling
(CNN)Even as the Trump administration has taken steps to expand offshore oil drilling, a new report shows that thousands of oil spills are still happening and that workers in the oil and gas industry are still dying on the job.
The report comes from Oceana, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring the oceans, which has sued the federal government to stop seismic airgun blasting in the Atlantic Ocean. The blasting is the first step needed to allow offshore drilling, when seismic airguns are used to find oil and gas deep under the ocean.
Every state along the Atlantic coast has opposed the blasting, worried that spills could hurt tourism and local fisheries. Some scientists say the testing could also hurt marine life, including the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The group tied its report, released Thursday, to the ninth anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to show what has been happening since the government promised to hold the industry accountable to higher safety standards.
That 2010 spill was one of the worst in US history, killing 11 people and dumping more than 210 million gallons of oil into the ocean, polluting over 1,300 miles of shoreline, killing wildlife and hurting human health. In the lawsuit that followed, a federal judge said the companies involved in the spill were "grossly negligent" in the runup to the disaster.
Using public records and interviews with people in the field, Oceana found that although there hasn't been another big blowout like the Deepwater accident, oil spills continue, and so do fatalities, though they're not often front-page news.
Read more (Includes video): https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/18/health/offshore-drilling-study/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Given the data in this article, it doesn't appear that we learned much since then. 
