To wake up to. The sunrise will be coming up in the next 20 minutes. We are here for a serious reason. Not just to enjoy what promises to be a lovely day. We are discussing a topic which matters an awful lot to you at home. Water quality. The amount of sewage in our water. This morning we will hear from the Water Companies. We hearfrom the Environment Secretary, Therese Coffey. We will hear from campaigners. And we would love to hearfrom campaigners. And we would love to hear from you as well. We will let you know how to get in touch throughout breakfast. Because we have a big bbc investigation today, it has found that what looks like the Water Companies illegally discharging raw Sewage Hundreds Of Times Last year. Our team has seen analysis. They have looked at data from three of the largest Water Companies, times, wessex and Southern Water. It appears to show that On 400 Spills Last year, lasting thousands of hours, sewage was released, not during wet weather, storms, heavy rain and
today. good to see you, sir, thank you. thanks for having me. shepard: what did you tell them? well, my job was to talk about the economic impact of the spill and there are two stories of economic impact. one is the impact of the spill itself, very acute if you look at the fishing industry, if you look at the tourism industry. they re going to feel it directly. another story, another impact, is the impact of the moratorium. the fact is the economic impact of the moratorium is probably going to dwarf the actual impact of the spill itself. shepard: of course when president bush had a similar thing happen he stopped in until they figured out why it happened. i wonder what your thoughts are on this. if they had not just for a second, if they had not tried for a moratorium and god forbid another well had exploded like this, how do you think people would feel about the folks who didn t put the moratorium in place then? no, you re articulating a
it for us. jamie: we know that he is, thanks, eric. there is news from bp today that the gulf oil spill has now cost the oil giant more than $3 billion. that doesn t even include the 20 billion-dollar compensation account the white house had bp set up. gym evening else has been following the story and the distribution of cash. the spill has already cost a lot obviously. it it just the beginning? do they know what it will cost ultimately? reporter: no it s hard to tell. you ve got that more than $3 billion that s been spent already trying tow contain the oil drilling, relief wells, paying claims associated with the spill itself, along with grants to states and the federal costs of responding. there s been about 95,000 claims so far, jaime, submit towed bp. more than 40,000 payments have been made to individuals. about $147 million worth. there are many, many more claims
once again, take a live look at the leak from b.p. s underwater camera on the gulf floor. it s still flowing. steve harrigan, monitoring the latest live on grand isle in louisiana. steve, are you seeing any progress made from where you are? the 48-hour deadline given by the coast guard ends tonight. not sure what happens if they don t meet it. they ordered them to speed it up, and right now b.p. is collecting 15,000 barrels of oil a day from the fractured well. as much as 40,000 barrels is spreading out from it. as far as the spill itself, residents of alabama woke up this morning, some of them seeing four inches of oil goo on their beaches. the orange beach has been hit in particular. the white sands there. damaged by oil, so the spread actually moving now to other states, damaging their coastlines as well of louisiana. jamie? jamie: does it appear to you, steve, that the coast guard exercised all the
that in the bible too. not as many, and we don t take it seriously. that s the difference. we blow off our religions. if we took the bible seriously, we would look over our fence sunday morning seeing our neighbor mowing his lawn and think, huh, working on sunday, i really should kill him. that doesn t happen. but there are entire schools where the kids read just one book. they re memorizing the koran, that s all they do. you know, that s not what we do in this curve the. i want to talk a little bit about what s happening on the gulf coast. how do you think the response has been? do you think bp is going to pay for it? they may pay for the spill itself, they ll never pay for all the ancillary damage that goes on. so i you know, i have no idea what the response is so far. it s too early, and to me, that s not even the bigger