Saving Seafood

Congressional Democrats warn against merging offshore energy agencies

July 10, 2026 — The catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster led to the splitting of the federal Marine Minerals Administration into two separate agencies – one focused on offshore leasing and production, and another on safety.

Now Democratic leaders in Congress are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s move to reunite the agencies’ functions under one roof.

The April 2010 well blowout and fire killed 11 platform workers, discharged an estimated 4.9 billion barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and was only declared sealed five months later in September 2010.

Economic and environmental damages from the disaster led a year later to the creation of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to handle offshore energy management, alongside the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE).

In a July 8 letter to the Government Accountability Office, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., of the House Natural Resources Committee called for investigating the Department of the Interior’s proposal to recreate a unified Marine Minerals Administration.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

A deadly year in Canadian commercial fisheries

November 6, 2018 — The deadliest year in over a decade for commercial fishermen has the Transportation Safety Board of Canada sounding the alarm over what it calls the industry’s “disturbing safety record.”

So far in 2018, 17 people have died aboard fishing vessels, the most since 2004.

Those deaths were largely the result of crew members not wearing personal flotation devices or deploying safety signals, the board said Monday as it released its annual Watchlist.

“The industry’s safety culture still has a long way to go before its members stop accepting more risk than is necessary,” the board’s chair, Kathy Fox, told a news conference in Gatineau, Quebec.

In addition to fishing safety, the independent agency’s yearly report also calls attention to railway sign safety and runway safety at Canadian airports.

While safety measures have been recommended and implemented over the years in commercial fisheries, the board said it’s disappointed with the lack of results.

The number of fishing vessel deaths continues to fluctuate year to year. For example, there were 17 deaths in 2004, eight in 2016, three in 2017 and 17 again so far this year.

Read the full story at CBC News

Gov. Baker, Mass. Congressional delegation urge Obama to fund fishing safety programs

December 21, 2015 — Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and the state’s congressional delegation are urging President Barack Obama to include funding for fishing safety training and safety research grant programs in his next federal budget.

In a Dec. 18 letter to Obama, Baker and the entire Massachusetts delegation pointed out that, based on U.S. Department of Labor statistics compiled by Bloomberg Business, Nnortheast groundfishermen are 37 times more likely to die on the job than police officers and 171 times more likely to die on the job than the average U.S. worker.

“If our school teachers died on the job at the same rate as our fishermen in Massachusetts, we would lose 400 public school teachers each year,” they wrote to the president.

Read the full story from the Gloucester Daily Times