White House releases report on restoring Gulf Coast

The Obama administration has released a report on how the Gulf Coast can be restored in the wake of the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, which occurred after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded off the coast of Louisiana in April 2010. The report from the White House’s Gulf of Mexico Ecosystem Restoration Task Force comes out the same week Congress considers a bill designed to handle billions of dollars in Clean Water Act fines BP is expected to pay for the release of more than 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The restoration plan is a recipe for fixing the Gulf Coast’s myriad environmental problems—from land loss in the Mississippi River delta to the area of low-oxygen called the dead zone that besets the northern gulf waters every summer.