WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The United States has launched a program to reduce the risks associated with offshore oil and gas drilling operations, US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) said in a statement.
“[BSEE] Director [Brian] Salerno announced the launch of the Safe OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] program, an initiative aimed at collecting and analyzing ‘near miss’ data,” the statement read on Tuesday.
Salerno also released the first BSEE annual report that presents analysis of offshore activities, incidents and other key data, according to the statement.
“We are pleased to see that some of the most serious incidents offshore, including fatalities, are decreasing,” Salerno said in the statement.
Offshore oil and gas operations have become the center of public attention in 2010, when 4.9 million barrels of oil from British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon discharged into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill affected the natural habitat as well as the major fishing and tourism industries across the states bordering the Gulf.
The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which exercises the safety and environmental enforcement functions, was established in 2011 in response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
On April 22, 2015, US legislators introduced a bill to ban offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean to avoid a possible disaster similar to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
