BP failed to implement a new safety plan on the Deepwater Horizon rig, even though it realised a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was its greatest danger, a court heard yesterday.
Professor Robert Bea, an expert for people and businesses suing the company, was the first witness at a civil trial in New Orleans to determine how much more BP and other companies should pay for the spill. The professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said BP did not implement a two-year-old safety management programme on the rig that exploded in the Gulf in 2010.
“It’s a classic failure of management and leadership in BP,” said Prof Bea, a former BP consultant who also investigated the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the New Orleans levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The British company has said its operating management system was designed to drive a rigorous and systematic approach to safety and risk management. Yet it was implemented at only one of the seven rigs the company owned or leased in the Gulf.
Prof Bea said it was “tragic” and “egregious” that BP did not apply its own safety programme to the Deepwater Horizon rig before the Macondo well blowout triggered the explosion that killed 11 workers and spawned the massive spill. Transocean owned the rig and BP leased it.
Prof Bea said BP’s “culture of every dollar counts” was reflected in a May 2009 e-mail sent by BP well team leader John Guide. “The DW Horizon embraced ‘every dollar matters’ since I arrived 18 months ago,” Mr Guide wrote. “We have saved BP millions and no one had to tell us.”
In a report prepared for the trial, Prof Bea concluded that BP’s “process safety failures” were a cause of the blowout.
His evidence opened the second day of the trial.