Bromwich: Offshore drilling regulators need to step up enforcement

The former prosecutor who overhauled the federal agencies overseeing offshore drilling in the wake of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico wants to see regulators do more publicly to advance new safety rules and enforce the ones already on the books, The Houston Chronicle reports. “There has been a decline in the amount of public activity,” says Michael Bromwich, who left his post as interim head of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement late last year. “I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of activity.” As the two-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster approaches on April 20, a long-planned major drilling safety rule shows no signs of being proposed soon. There also haven’t been big public crackdowns on offshore drilling violations recently, following the safety bureau’s high-profile move last year to pursue penalties against BP and other companies associated with the gulf spill. In 2011, the federal government issued 2,690 “incidents of noncompliance” to companies that work offshore, the first step in penalizing the firms for violating rules governing the outer continental shelf. So far this year, 390 such incident reports have been issued, but none has drawn the public attention of last year’s BP spill infractions. “If you’re going to be a credible regulator, you’ve got to be aggressive in your enforcement,” Bromwich says. “We all need to see evidence of aggressive enforcement.” Read the full story here.