the fishermen for your livelihood. now imagine there was a catastrophic oil spill. well, it would really wipe your business out. reporter: leslie warren is a the natural resources defense council, a group monitoring oil spills for decades. he s worried about the potential for spillage if any oil platforms malfunction. but he said just the operation of the platform s infrastructures poses dangers. you have platforms. you have pipelines. you have ships and tankers, and you have storage facilities, and they re really all at risk from hurricanes or just ongoing spills. reporter: how close to the east coast could the platforms come? the obama blueprint calls for exploration in waters about 50 miles from virginia s coast, to see if any oil or gas is out there. but the government controls waters three miles from shore and out. so, if oil s discovered that close, you could see platforms that close. the waters close to florida s gulf coast are still protected, but drilling could take plac
risks to their seaside economies, the hundreds of billions of dollars in the fishery and tourism industries. leslie warren says if an east coast spill occurs on the scale of the 1989 exxon valdez accident, the oil spill could stretch from north carolina to massachusetts. the project for exploration won t even start until 2012. then they ll do seismic studies, environmental impact surveys, and give the public plenty of input in the process. myron ebel of the pro-business group the competitive enterprise group says this the risks of oil production in terms of doing environmental damage have been greatly reduced over the last several decades. but in terms of where the risks still are, i think it s in shipping rather than in in the wells and then piping it somewhere. ebel says the positive side of producing more oil in the u.s. is just too great to ignore