HOUSTON -- It's been 50 days, and as much a 200 million gallons of crude has spilled into the Gulf. Of all the unanswered questions surrounding the disaster, experts say one thing is certain.
"It took a series of errors and mistakes for this to happen," said Benton Baugh.
Baugh is president of Radoil, Inc. , a Houston company that manufactures parts for deepwater offshore rigs. A member of the National Academy of Engineers, he was also recently on a special panel that provided peer review and modified a report for President Obama containing 22 safety recommendations regarding deepwater offshore drilling. After the panel signed off on those recommendations, however, he said something was added to the report.
"They came back in and put a statement in for the six-month moratorium we were not aware of," Baugh said.
Not only was the panel unaware of the six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling, Baugh said they didn't approve of the idea at all.
"A six-month moratorium punishes a lot of people that did nothing wrong here and will be extremely disruptive to the oil industry and the country as a whole," Baugh.
He said it could ultimately cost the country as much as $100 million a day, as deepwater rigs are forced to move to foreign waters to drill.
In fact, in a letter sent to Baugh on June 3, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Interior said, "We did not mean to imply that you also agreed with the decision to impose a moratorium on all new deepwater drilling. We acknowledge that you were not asked to review or comment on the proposed moratorium."
"By the time you take into account the ripple effect with everybody out of work, it's going to be very expensive for a very long time," Baugh said.
The same could be said for the effects of the spill itself -- likely to be felt for years.
