Report by BP Says a Series of Failures Led to Oil Spill

[mike r]

Source: New York Times

The oil giant BP said Wednesday in its internal report that a number of failures involving several companies eventually led to the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“No single factor caused the Macondo well tragedy,” BP said in a statement about the report. “Rather, a sequence of failures involving a number of different parties led to the explosion and fire which killed 11 people and caused widespread pollution in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year.”

Conducted by the company’s safety chief, Mark Bly, and a team of about 50 mostly BP employees, the inquiry was initiated almost immediately after the April 20 explosion that killed 11 and spilled almost five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Citing “a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces,” the 193-page report deflects attention away from BP and back onto its contractors, especially Transocean, which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which performed cement jobs on the well.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/us/09spill.html

[indepat]

1. What will be left unsaid will be the cavalier corporate culture which put profits miles ahead of

safety as demonstrated by the consistency of their record on safety-related issues throughout the decades. :P

[primavera]

3. I was going to say...

... there was one single factor that caused this catastrophe and the thousands of others like it: greed - sheer, unbridled, unashamed greed.

[valerief]

2. A series of failures like BP's endless series of violations. nt

[wordpix]

5. good one!

[Jackpine Radical]

4. Translation from Corpospeak:

"Let's see if we can spread the blame as far as we spread the oil."

[No Elephants]

6. ...

“a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces,”

IOW, don't even bother to try to understnad this. It's much too complicated for the likes of you." Not to mention boring and probably unnecessarily long and tedious. Go for a nice swim or bike ride instead."


Let me bottom line this, BP: civil and criminal liability up the yin yang, including RICO

[Downwinder]

7. If the Contractors were incompetent, who hired and supervised them?

I still question the competency of the BP management structure to handle any mechanical systems. They appear to be pencil pushers and number crunchers rather than hands on operational staff.

[grahamhgreen]

8. Punching holes in the ocean lead to the spill. NO OFFSHORE DRILLING.

[Downwinder]

9. BP can't be trusted to safely operate a plant, pipeline, or port on land. n/t

[Nihil]

10. If anybody is interested in the report (rather than just the usual fact-free DU dogpile) ...

... the documents are linked from the following page:
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9034902&contentId=7064891

What a surprise though ... this item plummeted down the listings whereas
the Halliburton denial post was fully supported ...