From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Security of Offshore Energy after Deepwater Horizon

Audio interview by GAO staff with Stephen Caldwell, Director, Homeland
Security and Justice

Related GAO Work: GAO-12-203T: Deepwater Horizon: Coast Guard and
Interior Could Improve Their Offshore Energy Inspection Programs

Released on: November 2, 2011

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the Government Accountability Office. It's November 2,
2011. The Deepwater Horizon incident of April 2010 led to an increase in
national concern over the security of the nation's offshore energy
infrastructure. A group led by Stephen Caldwell, a director in GAO's
Homeland Security and Justice team, recently reviewed the Coast Guard's
efforts to ensure the security of such offshore facilities. GAO's Jeremy
Cluchey sat down with Stephen to learn more.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Can you provide a little bit of background about why
Congress requested this report?

[ Stephen Caldwell: ] Well, anyone that watched the media knows about
the Deepwater Horizon. This was a huge oil spill; the largest one in
U.S. history. And preceding the oil spill, there was actually an
explosion on this rig, a fire that burned for 3 days before the rig
entirely collapsed, and it led to the spilling of over 4 million gallons
of oil and drastic economic and environmental effects in the Gulf of
Mexico, in particular some of the coastal areas in Louisiana and other
states. A lot of the people that we work for in Congress that are
interested in security were concerned that terrorists might see that. In
fact, with some of the capture of al Qaeda leaders recently, there's
been several reports that one of the things they were specifically
targeting was maritime energy supplies and these types of facilities. I
do have to note that the Deepwater Horizon was not a security or
terrorist incident; it was a accident.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Your report looks specifically at two different
types of offshore energy infrastructure. Can you explain the distinction
that you make here?

[ Stephen Caldwell: ] Yeah, the two facilities are first of all offshore
facilities, which would include your typical oil rig, which is in terms
of...which is doing production of oil, and then it would be a drilling
rig, something that's called a "mobile offshore drilling unit," such as
the Deepwater Horizon, which just goes out there for drilling. Once
those exploratory drills are done with their work, then they hook it up
to a more production facility: the traditional oil rig. The second type
of facility is a deepwater port. So this would be a port, for example,
that is offshore that very large oil tankers or gas tankers would pull
up to, and it's almost like a reverse of a gas station. Then they hook
up to this connection at this port, then again through submarine
pipelines, these then move to shore for the gas or the oil.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What are some of the actions that the Coast Guard is
currently taking to help ensure the security of these sorts of
facilities? And then on the other side, what are some areas in which
they could improve?

[ Stephen Caldwell: ] Yeah, there's three basic actions; two of them we
report on very positively and one of them not so positively. But the
first one of those is the Coast Guard does review security plans for all
of these facilities, and we did find they did a good job of that. The
Coast Guard also has a plan for the whole Gulf of Mexico in terms of how
to protect facilities out there. In addition, the Coast Guard has
exercised these plans, and we did look at a exercise that was held; it
was a very large national-level exercise that actually looked at
terrorist threats to offshore energy facilities, and the Coast Guard and
other agencies wrote up an after-action report, they followed up on
those actions to try to resolve those, so that was very positive. Where
we found the Coast Guard's actions to be weaker were on the side of the
actual inspections of these facilities. The Coast Guard was not doing a
good job tracking the inspections of those facilities. They did a
relatively low number of the required inspections; for example, the
number of inspections range from 13 percent to about maybe 50 percent of
the required inspections they should have done that they did not do.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What is GAO recommending in this report?

[ Stephen Caldwell: ] The main areas for improvement in the
recommendations we made is that the Coast Guard improve its policies and
procedures for tracking those inspections to make sure that they're
done, the Coast Guard's database for inspections needs to be modified so
that they can do a better job actually tracking these facilities, and
then we found the same problems really for the deepwater ports as we
found for the offshore oil rigs in that the Coast Guard should really
consider whether they should have the same kind of oversight for
deepwater ports since they face very similar threats.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] For taxpayers affected by the Deepwater Horizon
incident and interested in what the government is doing to prevent
similar incidents in the future, what would you say is the bottom line
of this report?

[ Stephen Caldwell: ] Yeah, I'd say that the bottom line of our report
is more needs to be done. GAO's done other work on the Deepwater Horizon
oil spill as well and come to similar conclusions. But one of the
important points is there has been a top-to-bottom reevaluation of the
whole situation in terms of security, safety, and environmental
protection out there. There's been reports by the agency themselves,
there's been a presidentially appointed national commission who has
looked at it, and there have been a number of congressional hearings,
including the hearing we just had, which GAO testified at.

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[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's website at gao.gov and be sure
to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from
the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.