BP and contractors Halliburton and Transocean have been censured by one of the co-chairs of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which is investigating the Macondo well blow-out.
The Commission’s co-chairman, Bill Reilly, called for “top-to-bottom” reform at the three companies and laid the blame for the loss of the Deepwater Horizon on a “sweep of bad decisions” that they made.
Reilly warned that there was a culture of complacency at the three companies and there was “not a culture of safety on that rig”.
He said at the opening of the November hearing: “Presentations and examinations yesterday uncovered a suite of bad decisions: failed cement tests, premature removal of muds under-balancing the well, a negative pressure test that failed but was adjudged a success, apparent inattention, distraction or misreading of a key indicator that gas was rising toward the rig.”
He said too that the investigative team did not ascribe a motive to any of those decisions and reported that they found no evidence that those flawed decisions had been made to save money.
However, Reilly said that the investigators didn’t rule out a cost dimension, but they weren’t prepared to attribute mercenary motives to the men killed on the rig and therefore cannot speak for themselves.
“But the story they told is ghastly: one bad call after another,” Reillly said.
“Whatever else we learned and saw yesterday is emphatically not a culture of safety on that rig. I referred to a culture of complacency and speaking for myself, all these companies we heard from displayed it. And to me, the fact that each company is responsible for one or more egregiously bad decision, we’re closing in on the answer to the question I posed at the outset of yesterday’s hearing, whether the Macondo disaster was a unique event, the result of special challenges and circumstances, or indicates something larger, a systemic problem in the oil and gas industry.
“BP, Halliburton, and Transocean are major respected companies operating throughout the Gulf and the evidence is they are in need of top-to-bottom reform.
“We are aware of what appeared to be a rush to completion at Macondo, and one must ask whether the drive came from that which made people determine they couldn’t wait for sound cement, or the right centralizers. We know a safety culture must be led from the top, and permeate a company.
“The Commission is looking beyond the rig to the months and years before. BP has been notoriously challenged on matters of process safety.”
Fred Bartlit, the Commission’s counsel, challenged claims by members of the US Congress that choices made on money grounds had increased the danger of a spill.
He said earlier that there was “no evidence at this time to suggest that there was a conscious decision to sacrifice safety concerns to save money”.
“We see no instance where a decision-making person or group of people sat there aware of safety risks, aware of costs, and opted to give up safety for costs,” said Bartlit.
The Commission is to report its findings next month (January).