Chris Oynes, the head of the US government’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has quit following the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20.

MMS oversees offshore drilling regulation, and has been accused of poor oversight of the oil industry over the past decade. The service is set to be broken up following the disaster (The Times).

According to ABC News, “Though federal regulations require offshore drilling locations to be inspected by the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Mining Service every 30 days, those inspections have repeatedly not happened since the Deepwater Horizon site was permitted by MMS in 2001 – including one out of every four months since President Obama’s inauguration … in the 16 months from January 2009 through April 2010 MMS failed to inspect Deepwater Horizon four times – in May 2009, August 2009, December 2009, and January 2010.”

In testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said yesterday that oversight had been too lax, but that it was too early to draw any conclusions about whether the risk assessment of drilling projects was flawed (Wall Street Journal).

According to the Financial Times, Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, said yesterday that “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.”

“It’s impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment,” Hayward added.

Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has extended its restrictions on commercial and recreational fishing to cover about a fifth of the Gulf of Mexico’s federal waters.