BP said today it plans to boost its ability to capture the oil gushing from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico by early next week as the Obama administration announced that the oil giant agreed to speed up payments to people whose livelihoods have been washed away by the spill, according to AP. Fishermen, property owners and businesspeople who have filed damage claims with BP are angrily complaining of delays, excessive paperwork and skimpy payments that have put them on the verge of going under as the financial and environmental toll of the seven-week-old disaster grows. Under federal law, BP PLC is required to pay for a range of losses, including property damage and lost earnings, and the company has disputed any notion that the claims process is slow or that it has been dragging its feet. But on Thursday, Tracy Wareing, of the National Incident Command office, said administration officials raised a «pressing concern» during a meeting Wednesday with BP executives about the time the company has been taking to provide relief payments. She said the company would change the way it processes such claims and expedite payments. Among other things, it will drop the current practice of waiting to make such payments until businesses have closed their books for each month. Meanwhile, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised a Senate energy panel to ask BP to compensate energy companies for losses if they have to lay off workers or suffer economically because of the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling. Congressional leaders stepped up that pressure on BP on Thursday, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi telling reporters at the White House «every taxpayer in America must know that BP will be held accountable for what is owed.» Despite anger with BP, some lawmakers and Louisiana residents reiterated their call to end the 6-month deep-water drilling moratorium, saying it will cause economic hardship in the region. «Every one of these 33 deep-water wells employs, directly, hundreds of people and indirectly thousands,» Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu said in an interview Thursday on ABC's «Good Morning America.»
