May 18 (Bloomberg) -- The top-ranking U.S. official in charge of ensuring the safety of offshore oil rigs resigned four weeks after the Gulf of Mexico disaster that killed 11 workers, sank a $365 million vessel and triggered leaks that have gushed millions of gallons of crude into the sea. Chris Oynes, associate director of the offshore energy and minerals management program for the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, has left his job, Bill Lee, an agency spokesman, said yesterday in an interview.
Oynes, who was appointed chief of the division that oversees deep-sea oil exploration in 2007, left amid scrutiny of safety inspections and mounting criticism of what President Barack Obama described as the agency’s “cozy relationship” with the energy industry. Oynes served Republican and Democratic administrations during more than three decades in federal jobs.
“While I appreciate his many years of public service, I hope Chris Oynes’ decision to retire signals an understanding that a changing of the guard is necessary to cure MMS of the many ills it endured during the previous administration,” said U.S. Representative Nick J. Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat who heads the House natural-resources committee.
Presidential Rank Award
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans last week to split the minerals service into separate bodies with safety and revenue-collecting duties. The minerals agency is the largest source of U.S. Treasury funds behind the Internal Revenue Service, generating about $13 billion a year.
Oynes received a Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Service in 1998, during the Bill Clinton administration, an honor bestowed on just 5 percent of senior civil servants. During his career he also received the two highest awards the Interior Department makes to employees.
Oynes was elevated to chief of the offshore division in February 2007 after 13 years in charge of the agency’s Gulf of Mexico unit, where he oversaw 50 lease sales and safety inspections for 4,000 oil and natural-gas platforms, according to the Minerals Management Service’s website.
He was promoted by then-MMS Director Johnnie Burton, who quit three months later during a scandal over leases that allowed some energy producers to avoid billions of dollars in royalty payments to the federal government.
‘Bureaucratic Breakdown’
Agency spokesman Lee said yesterday that he didn’t know whether Oynes’s departure was voluntary, referring inquiries to the oil-spill response center staffed by employees from the Minerals Management Service, U.S. Coast Guard and BP Plc, which owns the damaged oil well.
Oynes couldn’t be reached. Telephone messages left yesterday at the Robert, Louisiana, response center and for Nicholas Pardi, a spokesman in the minerals service’s Washington office, weren’t returned.
“This wasn’t the doing of one, single person, but rather the culmination of a bureaucratic breakdown,” U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “Removing one person might be a start, but MMS is in need of an exhaustive overhaul and comprehensive reform.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Joe Carroll in Chicago at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net.
Poster Comment:
What Big Oil did in the gulf may or may not have been accidental ... but the fucking bankers have done the same thing to the economic ocean ... INTENTIONALLY ... and we should fire them all ... with bullets !!!!!