At recent Congressional hearings to determine what caused the disastrous Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the top officials of BP, Transocean, and Halliburton, formed a little circle of their own, pointing fingers and deflecting responsibility. It was, President Obama said, "a ridiculous spectacle."
The systems to prevent blowouts are intended to be fail-safe, McKay said. For reasons "we do not yet understand, in this case, they were not," he said. "Transocean's blowout preventer failed to operate."
Not us, them, said Steven Newman, Transocean CEO, pointing a
finger at BP. "All offshore oil and gas production projects
begin and end with the operator - in this case, BP," he said.
The operator "calls the shots," Newman said, "specifying where
and how a well is to be drilled, cased, cemented and completed."
The operator "serves as the general contractor that manages all
of the work that is performed on its lease."
The blow-out preventers "were clearly not the root cause of the
explosion," Newman said. That may be the case, but they did
fail to control the well once the blowout occurred. The root
cause of the event "was a sudden, catastrophic failure of the
cement, the casing or both," he said.
But Tim Probert, president, global business line for
Halliburton, the cement subcontractor on the Deepwater Horizon,
completed the circle stating that the cementing work "was
completed in accordance with the requirements of the well
owner's (BP) well construction plan." As a service provider to
the well owner, Halliburton "is contractually bound to comply
with the well owner's instructions on all matters relating to
the performance of all work-related activities." The well
owner's representative "has the ultimate authority for decisions
on how and when various activities are conducted."
"You had executives of BP and Transocean and Halliburton falling
over each other to point the finger of blame at somebody else,"
Obama said. "I will not tolerate more finger-pointing or
irresponsibility."
Failure may be an orphan. But the "cascade of failures," as Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat-New Mexico, characterized it, that resulted in the explosion and subsequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon, the inability to control the blowout and lack of preparation to deal with the hundreds of thousand of barrels of oil spewing from the broken pipes one mile beneath the surface, has many fathers, most prominently the companies and the regulatory agencies.
Perhaps most extraordinary was BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward's interview with a small group of reporters last week. He admitted that BP had not had the technology available to stop the leak. In "hindsight," he was reported to have said, it was "probably true" that BP should have done more to prepare for an emergency of that kind.
"Probably true?" How could anything be more obvious? As for "hindsight?" What about foresight?
Apparently BP believed its own assurances, as did federal regulators, that a major spill from its offshore operations was unlikely, and that in the unlikely event of a major spill, it had resources to deal with it.
Not only is BP's credibility in tatters, it violated explicit and implicit pledges to the public that it would have in place all possible measures to protect the environment from harm.
