WASHINGTON — Before the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP and drilling rig owner Transocean focused their safety efforts on curtailing worker injury rather than preventing catastrophic well blowouts, all but ignoring critical lessons from two near-misses just before
WASHINGTON — Before the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP and drilling rig owner Transocean focused their safety efforts on curtailing worker injury rather than preventing catastrophic well blowouts, all but ignoring critical lessons from two near-misses just before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, according to a new federal investigation of the disaster.
The report issued Tuesday by the Chemical Safety Board is the latest in a string of federal and independent inquiries into the blowout of BP’s Macondo well, which killed 11 workers and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the sea, making it the country’s worst offshore environmental accident.
Although each report has exposed practices and events that led to the disaster, the investigations’ findings have overlapped enough to expose what was a highly dangerous deepwater drilling project marked by lax safety, poor communication and ad-hoc decision-making.
The board’s report suggests that BP and Transocean, along with federal regulators, should have known better. After a 2005 explosion at its Texas City, Texas, oil refinery that killed 15 employees, BP vowed to institute a new safety system that assessed risks and hazards. Five years later, the company had made progress at its onshore activities but not offshore.
“When asked about roll-out in the Gulf of Mexico, a high level BP manager stated to the CSB, ‘We were just getting started,’” according to the Chemical Safety Board report.
Instead, BP, Transocean and the federal regulator, the now-reorganized Minerals Management Service, paid attention to a checklist of worker slips and falls, which translate to lost man-hours and money. Even now, the report said, companies and federal regulators look at past events, such as fires and injuries, rather than adopting systems prevalent in other oil-producing countries to predict and prevent trouble.
“It is almost as if they are driving a car by looking in the rear-view mirror,” the report concluded.
BP said that outside inquiries and its own investigation have prompted substantial changes.
