{"id":548296,"date":"2010-04-30T10:38:20","date_gmt":"2010-04-30T14:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.southernstudies.org,2010:\/\/5.12245"},"modified":"2010-04-30T10:52:21","modified_gmt":"2010-04-30T14:52:21","slug":"bp-had-other-problems-in-years-leading-to-gulf-spill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/548296","title":{"rendered":"BP had other problems in years leading to Gulf spill"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"deepwater_horizon_fire.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill
\nsoon to make landfall in the Gulf of Mexico, is no stranger to major
\naccidents.<\/p>\n

\nIn fact the company has found itself at the center of several of the
\nnation’s worst oil and gas-related disasters in the last five years.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn March 2005 a massive explosion ripped through a tower at BP’s
\nrefinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring 170
\nothers. Investigators later determined that the company had ignored its
\nown protocols on operating the tower, which was filled with gasoline,
\nand that a warning system had been disabled.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe company pleaded guilty to federal felony charges and was fined more
\nthan $50 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.\n<\/p>\n

\nAlmost a year after the refinery explosion, technicians discovered that
\nsome 4,800 barrels of oil had spread into the Alaskan snow through a
\ntiny hole in the company’s pipeline in Prudhoe Bay. BP had been
\n warned<\/a><\/span> to check the pipeline in
\n2002, but hadn’t, according to a report in Fortune. When it did inspect
\nit, four years later, it found that a six-mile length of pipeline was
\ncorroded. The company temporarily shut down its operations in Prudhoe
\nBay, causing one of the largest disruptions in U.S. oil supply in recent
\n history.\n<\/p>\n

\nBP faced $12 million in fines for a misdemeanor violation of the federal
\n Water Pollution Control Act. A congressional committee determined BP
\nhad ignored opportunities to prevent the spill and that “draconian”
\ncost-saving measures had led to shortcuts in its operation.\n<\/p>\n

\nOther problems followed. There were more spills in Alaska. And BP was
\ncharged with manipulating the market price of propane. In that case, it
\nsettled with the U.S. Department of Justice and agreed to pay more than
\n$300 million in fines.\n<\/p>\n

\nAt each step along the way, the company’s executives were contrite.\n<\/p>\n

\n“This was a preventable incident… It should be seen as a process
\nfailure, a cultural failure and a management failure,” John Mogford,
\nthen BP’s senior group vice president for safety and operations, said in
\n an April 2006 speech about the lessons learned in Texas City. “It’s not
\n an easy story to tell. BP doesn’t come out of it well.”\n<\/p>\n

\nIn a 2006 interview with this reporter after the Prudhoe Bay spill, published
\n in Fortune<\/a><\/span>, BP’s chief executive
\n of American operations, Robert Malone, said “there is no doubt in my
\nmind, what happened may not have broken the law, but it broke our
\nvalues.”\n<\/p>\n

\nMalone insisted at the time that there was no pattern of mismanagement
\nthat increased environmental risk.\n<\/p>\n

\n“I cannot draw a systemic problem in BP America,” he said. “What I’ve
\nseen is refineries and facilities and plants that are operating to the
\nhighest level of safety and integrity standards.”\n<\/p>\n

\nNonetheless Malone, who spent three decades at BP and was promoted to
\nthe CEO of BP America shortly after the Texas refinery blast, promised
\nto increase scrutiny over BP’s operations and invest in environmental
\nand safety measures.\n<\/p>\n

\nHe told Congress that it was imperative BP management learn from its
\nmistakes.\n<\/p>\n

\n“The public’s faith has been tested recently,” he said. “We have fallen
\nshort of the high standards we hold for ourselves and the expectations
\nthat others have for us.”\n<\/p>\n

\nTime will tell whether the accident that killed 11 workers and sent the
\nTransocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — a $500 million platform as
\nwide as a football field — floating to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico
\n was simply an accident or something else.\n<\/p>\n

\nMalone, who retired last year, declined to comment for this article. A
\nspokesman for BP was not available for comment.\n<\/p>\n

\nFamilies of workers who died in the accident have already filed lawsuits
\n accusing BP of negligence. Congress, as well as the Minerals Management Service, the federal agency that regulates drilling in the
\nGulf, were already separately investigating allegations that BP has
\nfailed to keep proper documents about how to perform an emergency
\n shutdown<\/a><\/span> of the Atlantis,
\nanother Gulf oil platform and one of the largest in the world.\n<\/p>\n

\nThere are also indications that BP and Transocean, the owner of the
\nDeepwater Horizon rig that burned and sank, could have used backup
\n safety gear<\/a><\/span> — a remote acoustic
\n switch that would stanch the flow of oil from a leaking well 5,000 feet
\n underwater — to prevent the massive spill now floating like a
\nslow-motion train wreck towards the Mississippi and Louisiana coastline.
\n The switch isn’t required under U.S. law, but is well-known in the
\nindustry and mandated in other parts of the world where BP operates.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn the year before the accident, BP once again aggressively cut costs. A
\n reorganization stripped 5,000 jobs from its payroll, saving BP more
\nthan $4 billion in operating costs, according to a report sent to
\nProPublica by Fadel Gheit, an investment analyst for Oppenheimer.\n<\/p>\n

\nOn April 27, as the U.S. Coast Guard worked with BP engineers to guide
\nremote control submarines nearly a mile underwater in a futile effort to
\n close a shut-off valve, BP told investors that its quarterly earnings
\nwere up more than 100 percent over the last year, beating expectations
\nby a large margin. After underperforming its competition throughout the
\nlast decade, Gheit wrote, BP was the only major oil company to perform
\nbetter than the S&P 500 last year.<\/p>\n

(Photo of fire on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig from the U.S. Coast Guard<\/a>.)<\/i><\/font><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica BP, the global oil giant responsible for the fast-spreading spill soon to make landfall in the Gulf of Mexico, is no stranger to major accidents. In fact the company has found itself at the center of several of the nation’s worst oil and gas-related disasters in the last five years. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5733,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5733"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}