Ten years ago today the BP Oil Spill killed 11 rig workers and coated much of the state’s coastline in tar.
Congressman Garrett Graves was the head of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority at the time. He says his first thoughts upon seeing the news were about the lives lost, and the work that had been undone.
“Spending millions and millions of dollars on restoring our barrier islands and coastal area and thinking about how this was going to completely destroy all the progress we had made,” says Graves.
The Deepwater Horizon well sat about 41 miles off the Louisiana coast drilling in the Macondo Prospect.
The cleanup job was immense, but Graves remembers it was expedited by a one of its kind agreement cut with BP to get projects off the ground in record time.
“Y’all know that you owe billions of dollars here. We can sit here and have this big legal fight and this thing can go on for years, or you can agree now that you can make a billion-dollar down payment,” says Graves.
Along with its financial penalties, BP also plead guilty to 11 counts of manslaughter and felony lying to Congress.
Louisiana received just over eight billion dollars in settlement funds to help restore the coast and billions more in economic damages as a result.
“What we negotiated ended up being the largest settlement in US history from a single company and Louisiana will get substantially more than all of the other states,” says Graves.
The spill pumped 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.
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