BP pays $3.8 billion to 300, 000 victims of Gulf Coast oil spill

The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig ablaze. Oil spill picture. Image: U.S. Coast Guard.


BP pays $3.8 billion to 300, 000 victims of Gulf Coast oil spill

The British Petroleum has already paid $3.8 billion to 300, 000 victims of the catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill according to the Dan Rather Reports.

The spill stemmed from a sea-floor oil gusher that resulted from an explosion of Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010. Deepwater Horizon drilled on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. The explosion killed 11 men working on the platform and injured 17 others. On July 15, the leak was stopped by capping the gushing wellhead, after it had released about 4.9 million barrels (205.8 million gallons) of crude oil.

Rather will interview Ken Feinberg, Administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility on Tuesday, April 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET to track progress one year after the spill began.

Feinberg was asked by the Obama Administration and British Petroleum to design, implement, and administer a process to pay eligible claimants.

British Petroleum has pledged to put up $20 billion to help the Gulf Coast recover from the spill and the G.C.C.F. has received over 750,000 claims to date from all over the United States. Half of those claims have been denied by the G.C.C.F. and they are currently looking at reviewing another 150,000 pending claims. And the claims continue to pour in at a rate of 500 claims per week; however, claimants will only have until August 13, 2013 that's when the program will go out of existence.

"Dan Rather Reports" also discusses the current state of the Gulf with Feinberg and how he and the G.C.C.F. determined what Feinberg calls a "reasonable" assumption about the Gulf returning to "normal" by the end of 2012.

BP has disagreed with this saying the Gulf will be "perfect in the next three to six months". And this isn't BP's only disagreement with the Administrator.

"BP is not happy," said Feinberg. "First, they say that providing a final payment based on damage through 2012 is way too generous. The final payment should be based on damage through the middle of this year. The other complaint is they think I've been, on some claims, too generous."

Also on tonight's program, Rather and his team look at Afghanistan's largest foreign investment project – a copper mine, now controlled by the Chinese government.

Don't miss "Dan Rather Reports: The Mother Lode" premiering on HDNet, TONIGHT, Tuesday, April 12 at 8:00 p.m. ET with an encore at 11:00 p.m. ET.

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