Maryland's Benjamin Cardin and Barbara Mikulski joined with senators from New Jersey and Florida to praise President Barack Obama's new moratorium on offshore drilling, even as they again criticized it for not going far enough.
Five senators representing Atlantic seaboard states responded quickly to the President's cancellation of an offshore drilling lease sale in Virginia. Senator Cardin said the BP disaster in the Gulf provided a heightened sense of the potential danger of such projects.
"An active site in Virginia was just 50 miles off of the mouth of the Chesapeake. And we know that the tides bring in the ocean waters twice a day, which means that any spill at that distance from the coast would have had catastrophic impact for generations to come in the Chesapeake Bay and along the beaches," Cardin said.
Cardin and the other four echoed the same sentiments of what they want from the Obama Administration in the wake of the Gulf Coast drilling catastrophe.
"Our objective is that we need the entire Atlantic Coast permanently off the table," he said.
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