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NRC is the sole contact for reporting oil spills in the Gulf – good or bad?
The primary function of the National Response Center is to serve as the sole national point of contact for reporting all oil, chemical, radiological, biological, and etiological discharges into the environment anywhere in the United States and its territories.
Since it is the polluter’s responsibility to report an oil spill it’s reasonable to ask how accurate the reports are concerning the amount spilled (as we saw during the initial weeks of the Deepwater Horizon spill). This makes it difficult to rely on datasets derived from the information collected through the NRC incident reporting system.
This is interesting to note because another of the tasks SkyTruth asked me to look into was the sources of oil pollution information referenced in Oil in the Sea III, the government’s leading report on the causes and amounts of oil pollution in US waters. Most of the tables in the Oil and Gas Extraction section rely on information from the NRC. The tables show a definite decrease in oil spill incidents since the 1970s. Is this because of an increase in safety standards resulting in fewer spills or is it due to less accurate self-reporting?
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