At Least 27 Accidents In BP Alaskan Oil & Gas Operations In 2017

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“If there had been an ignition source, we might have lost colleagues,” BP Alaska President Janet Weiss wrote in an email to Team Alaska, the workforce in the state, on Sept. 12. “We must change now; we must have a reset,” Weiss added. She sent another urgent plea to staff two weeks later. “Our safety performance — both process and personal — is not where it should be and no other business objective is more important,” Weiss wrote in an email to Alaska staff on Sept. 27.

The company was concerned enough to take the drastic step of removing many workers from Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil and gas field in the state, for the first 12 days of October. This break, and the preceding accidents, likely cut into BP’s bottom line, which in Alaska hit $85 million in 2016. During the recent pause, staff took part in large workshops and smaller team-level discussions focused on improving safety.

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“BP management recognizes the many recent critical incidents we’ve experienced will lead to a death,” a longtime employee told BuzzFeed News. “We are making the same mistakes we made 40 years ago.” Since the company started drilling in Prudhoe Bay in 1968, its operations in Alaska and elsewhere have resulted in a series of devastating accidents. Explosions at a Texas City refinery in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 180 more. Following a 2006 oil spill in Prudhoe Bay, the company had to pay millions in fees.

And in April 2010, BP caused the largest oil spill in US history. That’s when the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded about 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, killing 11 workers, injuring at least 16 others, and releasing more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Marine animal populations are still struggling to recover, as are coastal wetlands, beaches, and other habitats polluted by the spill. The company has estimated the pretax cost of the spill is about $61.6 billion.

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/zahrahirji/bp-alaska-resets-safety-after-five-accidents?utm_term=.phBlDVlQnl#.yd0YBEY6rY

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