I wish I could say I was surprised by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But I'm not. I've seen the news stories over the past few years. Like Massey Energy, the company that refused to adopt safe mining practices at its Upper Big Branch coal mine and played cat-and-mouse games with federal regulators for years until 29 miners were killed in a mine explosion earlier this month, BP has an established track record of neglecting safety and proper maintenance, and it is no surprise that such practices have once again borne disastrous fruit.
In 2005, there was a fatal explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City. 15 people died and 170 were injured.
An official investigation into the causes of the Texas City explosion concluded in 2007 that senior BP executives, under the company's former chief executive, Lord Browne, had failed to act on red flags over safety at Texas City. Fatigue was a factor as one of the employees involved had worked 12-hour shifts for 33 consecutive days. And living quarters were positioned too close to safety-critical machinery.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Then, in 2006, BP's Prudhoe Bay oil pipelines sprang a series of leaks due to corrosion and had to be shut down, restricting oil supplies. (Remember the summer 2006 gasoline price runup?) Investigation revealed that for FOURTEEN YEARS, BP and its corporate predecessor had simply stopped running "pigs", or scouring/testing devices, through the pipeline on a regular basis. The way this was described to me, they stopped running the "pigs" because the devices started getting hung up on... wait for it... CORROSION. Yeah, the stuff they were supposed to detect. They detected it, but BP chose to ignore it. Because that was the cheap and easy thing to do.
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/...
Source: http://www.npr.org/...
In October of 2009, OSHA was obliged to fine BP again for willful refusal to correct ongoing safety problems at the same Texas City refinery that killed 15 people in 2005.
[OSHA] announced that it had since issued 270 notifications to BP for failure to correct hazards and that it had found 439 new "willful violations".
BP immediately pledged to appeal against the fine, which it described as "disappointing", and said that it "strongly disagrees" with OSHA's findings....
... Most of the violations relate to management of safety procedures and failures to install pressure relief systems on the type of chemical tower that exploded at Texas City. [Emphasis added]
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Failure to install pressure relief systems. Huh.
Now we are told that BP's deep-sea drilling rig Deepwater Horizon was supposed to have a blowout preventer at the throat of the well. This massive device is designed to prevent the kind of hellish inferno that killed 11 people on April 20. If worse comes to worst, it is supposed to act as an emergency shutoff valve to plug the well. But, strangely, the blown-out well is behaving as if there were no such impediments.
The most positive interpretation one can put on this is that the blowout preventer failed to operate properly. Might BP's track record of shoddy maintenance have anything to do with such a failure? Or might BP have turned a willfully blind eye to shoddy performance on the part of a contractor? That would have been the cheap and easy thing to do.
It also seems possible that, as with BP's refusal to operate the "pigs" essential to proper maintenance of its Alaska pipelines, and its refusal to install mandated pressure relief systems at its Texas City refinery, BP ignored acknowledged best practices in the industry because, in the short term, that's the cheap and easy thing to do. Keep those expenses down. Boost the quarterly profit statement. Boost the executives' payout. Make Wall Street happy.
Problem is, it's cheap and easy only until the refinery explodes, or the pipeline rusts through, or the well blows out, incinerates its crew, and spews a gigantic oil slick into the Gulf of Mexico, killing wildlife, decimating the fishing industry, and poisoning hundreds of miles of beaches and coastal wetlands.
There are strong indications that BP has for many years had a corporate culture of doing the cheap and easy thing, the shoddy thing, rather than properly maintaining and operating their equipment.
It is possible that the Deepwater Horizon blowout was due to some novel circumstance such as encountering a far higher pressure than previous wells had encountered. It is also possible that the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and its disastrous aftereffects, are due to shoddy maintenance of equipment or negligent refusal to follow required or recommended safety procedures. BP's track record suggests that the latter is unfortunately very, very possible.