February 9, 2018 — Gov. Gina Raimondo is urging Rhode Islanders to speak up against a federal plan that would open waters off the state’s coast to drilling for oil and gas.
In an interview in her State House office, she said the Trump administration’s plan to overturn an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling along the nation’s East Coast poses a threat to Rhode Island’s commercial fishing industry and the beaches along the state’s 400 miles of coastline.
Raimondo said she requested the meeting with The Providence Journal to raise public awareness about the drilling plan. It was the first time in her tenure as governor that she has asked for such a meeting in regard to an environmental issue.
“I find the whole thing to be really quite alarming,” she said. “This might happen if we don’t oppose it loudly enough.”
In January 1996, the barge North Cape spilled 828,000 gallons of home heating oil off Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, killing thousands of shore birds and millions of lobsters.
It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in Rhode Island history, but the size of the spill was relatively small. The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 in Alaska totaled 11 million gallons of crude while the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill may have released up to 20 times that amount into the Gulf of Mexico.
“The greatest concern would be an oil spill,” Raimondo said. “I was in high school when Exxon Valdez happened so I still remember that very vividly. The BP oil spill seems like it was yesterday. That could happen here. I think Rhode Islanders need to know that.”
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically-recoverable oil on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Less than a tenth of the total potential resources are on the Atlantic coast.
The proposal released by the Department of the Interior in January would take effect from 2019 to 2024. Lease sales for the North Atlantic region would take place in 2021.
Read the full story at the Providence Journal