BP spent more than $93 million on advertising -- more than $5 million a week -- in roughly four months surrounding the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a congressional committee reported today in a letter to a Florida lawmaker.

That amount, from April through July, is triple the amount the company spent on advertising over the same period in 2009, noted House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., in the letter to Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla.

Castor, a member of the energy committee who has been pushing for that information, responded angrily. She argued some of that money could have been better spent, perhaps on the decline in Florida tourism after the April 20 rig explosion and subsequent oil spill.

"While BP's advertising campaign ramped up, businesses and the Gulf communities struggled to deal with the costs of the disaster," Castor said in a statement. "While BP's advertising campaign is being executed like clockwork, business and state claims have languished."

Castor added: "As small businesses, fishermen, and mom and pop motels, hotels and restaurants struggle to make ends meet, they are bombarded by BP's corporate marketing largess day after day. BP should be doing more to address the damage to the Gulf Coast tourism industry, fishing industry, and for researchers and for the taxpayers."

Waxman's letter, co-signed by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, says BP provided its advertising information to the committee on Monday. It describes BP's increased spending as "almost entirely targeted at national and local newspapers and magazines and national and local television advertising."

According to the information provided to the committee Monday, the letter also says that BP actually aired fewer spots on television and radio this April to July than the same period last year, "but a higher percentage were national and longer, 60-second spots."

BP also has indicated that it significantly expanded the markets in which it ran local newspaper advertisements during the 2010 period.

From April to July 2009, states the letter, the company ran local-market newspaper advertisements in two states and in Washington D.C. In that same period this year, the company ran newspaper ads in 126 local markets in 17 states, including the states directly affected by the oil spill.

The letter to Castor does point out that BP provided $89.5 million in grants to aid tourism promotion efforts in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana after the spill. Some of those funds may have been used by each state or its tourism agency, the letter says.

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