Officials Partner To Seek Ban On Offshore Seismic Air Gun Testing

OCEAN CITY — While the Obama administration announced in March it was abandoning plans to open a vast swath of ocean off the mid-Atlantic coast for offshore drilling for oil and natural gas reserves, the threat of seismic air gun blasting remains a very real threat, prompting lawmakers from Maryland and Delaware to fire off a letter this week urging the federal government to ban the controversial practice.

In mid-March, a collective sigh of relief was heard from coastal communities along the east coast when the federal government reversed course on a controversial plan to lease a vast area totaling three million acres off the mid-Atlantic coast for offshore drilling for oil and natural gas reserves. The reversal came after strong opposition to the proposal from local, state and federal elected officials, environmental advocacy groups and hundreds of coastal communities along the east coast whose economies rely on clean oceans, healthy natural resources, tourism and commercial and recreational fishing.

However, left on the table was a federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) proposal to allow private sector companies to utilize potentially harmful seismic air gun testing to determine what oil and gas reserves lay beneath the ocean floor off the mid-Atlantic coast in some areas as close as 20 miles from Ocean City and neighboring Delaware resort communities. While the proposed plan to open the offshore areas to drilling was abandoned, the threat of seismic testing for those same reserves remains a real threat.

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