The Hill News

Officials from the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) have warned a House committee that an investigation of the Deepwater Horizon spill will mean shuttering other cases.

The House Energy and Committee Committee, chaired by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), had asked the board to investigate the spill this summer because of what Waxman praised as its "unmatched institutional knowledge of BP's safety culture."

The board had conducted a two-year probe of a 2005 explosion at a BP refinery in Texas -- an event that some observers say prefigured the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Still, CSB officials say that they'll have to close other inquiries in order to accommodate the new request.

It is currently investigating, among other cases, explosions at the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown Conn. and at the ConAgra Slim Jim facility in Garner, N.C., which killed six and four people, respectively.

ABC reports that the CSB has 40 employees and a $10.6 million budget while the National Transportation Safety Board, a comparable body, has hundreds of personnel and approximately $80 million in resources.

The CSB has requested an additional $2 million to hire more staff and to open an office in Houston for the BP case. 

"We already have a higher number of open investigations than we have actual investigators on staff," then-CSB chairman John Bresland wrote in a letter this summer to Waxman and committee member Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). "To investigate the rig disaster, we anticipate that certain extraordinary measures will be required."