Gulf Coast Oil Spill

Floor Speech

Mr. LeMIEUX. Madam President, I come to the floor of the Senate to talk about not only the environmental but economic disaster that has happened in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to fly over the scene of the spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig along with my colleagues Senator Sessions, Senator Shelby, and Congressman Jeff Miller who represents Florida's First Congressional District.

What we saw was pretty startling. As we flew out over the ocean, we saw the beginning of a spill. At first, it looked like a sheen, something one might see with gasoline laying on a concrete floor at a gas station. But as we got closer to where the Deepwater Horizon oil platform was located before, where it fell into the water, we began to see these great bands of orange, rust-colored oil that streaked across the Gulf of Mexico. We began to see small clumps of what looked like tar.

As we got closer to the scene of the incident, those small clumps turned into what I would describe as large pads of tar that floated to the surface.

We saw the new rigs that are being set up to start the drilling to do escape drilling to allow for the pressure to be taken off the spill where it is located now. We saw some of the cleanup vessels. There were about 10 vessels out there. We understand there are close to 100 involved in the total containment of this spill.

What is concerning to me--and I know is concerning to many Members of Congress--is what could happen, what might happen next. There are a lot of folks working very hard in the Coast Guard and the government. We met with Captain Pullen at the Mobile training facility for the Coast Guard, who briefed us on what is going on so far.

If we do not get this wellhead to stop leaking oil into the ocean, estimated at 5,000 barrels a day--we don't know how much is leaking. It could be less than that; it could be a lot more. If we do not stop the wellhead from leaking, we are going to have a lot bigger problem. This area has grown every day since April 21 when we had this disaster. It is measured by the size of States. First, it was Rhode Island, then it was Delaware. It is growing bigger and bigger.

When the storms subside, as they are doing now, that sheen is going to spread out even further. It certainly is going to likely impact my State of Florida and our beaches and our commercial fishermen and our recreational fishermen. There is cause for great concern.

The reason I come to the floor today is to make this point. There are those who are casting blame on British Petroleum. There are those who are casting blame on the government. There will be time for that. Whether the government has done a proper job of getting on this problem from day one, as we are hearing; whether British Petroleum properly worked along with the folks who ran this rig, the Transocean folks; whether they made mistakes--certainly, mistakes were made--there

will be time for us to evaluate that. What we must do now is spend all of our energy and efforts stopping the leak from this well because if we don't, we may see an oilspill that is the entire expansion of the Gulf of Mexico. We may see oil that not only hurts the gulf coast of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, but we potentially could see this oil go around the southern part of Florida, into the Everglades, into Florida Bay, into the Thousand Islands area--not to mention the coast on the western side of Florida, come up on the Atlantic side and get in the Gulf of Mexico and come all the way up the coast.

I am here to urge that all my colleagues support the administration and BP and everyone else who is working on this to stop the leak we have now. To me, it is the most important thing.

There were obviously issues of negligence that caused this disaster to happen in the first place. The questions of whether the Federal Government did everything it should have done in the beginning days when this happened will have to be answered, and folks are going to have to come before our committees to answer those questions. But right now, we have to stop this leak and we have to have an increased sense of urgency of stopping that leak and containing the oil.

We are putting this dispersant in now at the site of the wellhead. That is apparently having some good effect. BP has also been able--as we learned yesterday from Captain Pullen at the Mobile station--to close one of the hydraulic fail-safe valves. We know it wasn't fail-safe, but at least some of that has been closed, which is stopping, we hope, in some way the amount of oil going into the Gulf of Mexico. There is a crisis now, but the crisis to come could be far worse if we do not stop the leak from the wellhead.

DANGEROUS TIES BETWEEN VENEZUELA AND IRAN

Mr. President, over the last 6 months, we have seen two more attempts that we know of against the United States from terrorist attacks--most recently at Times Square. Thanks to the vigilance of some New Yorkers and the fine work of the New York Police Department, a bombing was stopped. We also remember that on Christmas day, when Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a plane over the skies of America, thankfully, that bomb did not explode. These are very dangerous times.

I continue to come to the floor to say that we not only need to pay attention to the east, where this danger is stemming from, but we also have to pay attention to the south. We have to continue to pay attention to Venezuela and the dangerous ties between Venezuela and Iran. I have come to the floor to speak about the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are now in Iran. We know a Spanish judge has accused Venezuelan authorities of conspiring with the ETA, a radical group in Spain, to assassinate the President of Colombia. We know Venezuela is collaborating with the FARC, the narcoterrorist group, which is bringing in drugs and destabilizing all of Central America all the way up into Mexico. We know of this dangerous situation. We know there are flights now between Venezuela and Iran through Syria that don't go through the normal customs procedures, where folks get off the plane in Venezuela and who knows where they go. We also know now that Iran has sent shock troops to Venezuela. We have also heard of a foiled attempt from a company called VenIran--presumably Venezuela-Iran--to ship alleged tractor parts to Venezuela that turned out to be explosive materials.

I come to the floor today to update this continuing story and to begin to bring, hopefully, the focus of this Congress and this administration on the gathering storm that is Venezuela and its contacts with Iran. It is not only that there are now shock troops from Iran in Venezuela, but we see the Chinese Government giving $20 billion to Venezuela for derivative--future--potential to purchase oil, apparently. So lots of questions need to be asked, and we need answers from this administration about a focus on Venezuela. Hugo Chavez is a dangerous man, and the continued attempts by the Venezuelan regime to work with Cuba to spread disharmony throughout the region, to try to bring other Latin American countries along with his strong-man tactics, are cause for concern.

I will conclude with this, Mr. President. Two weekends ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West, FL, where tremendous work is done by the Coast Guard, the Navy, the FBI, DEA, and all sorts of other agencies to interdict drug trafficking from South America, Central America, into the United States. We know Venezuela is allowing flights to go over its country from Colombia to bring those drugs into Central America. We know how violence comes from those drugs, and we are seeing the destabilization of Mexico because of it. We also know there are semisubmersible craft--minisubmarines, if you will--that ride just below the water that are being used by drug traffickers out of Colombia, with the
support of Venezuela, to bring large amounts of cocaine into the United States. Those same craft could be used to deliver a weapon of terror.

This administration and the world have to focus not just on Iran but on the dangerous ties between Iran and Venezuela.

Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor. I see my friend and colleague from Tennessee is here to speak.

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