BP Attempts “Static Kill” To Permanently Plug Damaged Oil Well

Just a few days shy of five years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people and spilled nearly 5 million barrels of oil in to the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration has proposed safety regulations.

The activist group Public Citizen called the long wait “an indictment of our regulatory process,” but U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell defended the pace.

“Those things take time and we want to make sure that when we come out with a regulation like this it’s been done very thoughtfully in consultation with a lot of different parties,”Jewell said during a conference call on Monday.

Indeed, according to the New York Times, “The oil industry, which typically chafes at new regulations, has worked closely with the Obama administration on the development of new safety rules since the 2010 disaster.”