It’s exactly one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst in the nation’s history, and so far no fewer than nine books have attempted to take stock of the situation.
According to a Los Angeles Times review, this gusher of postmortem writing, and three books in particular, offers a number of insights.
“Fire on the Horizon: the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster” rebuts the notion that oil-driller BP and rig-owner Transocean didn’t care about safety.
Co-authors Tom Shroder and John Konrad, a veteran journalist and a former oil-rig mariner, respectively, point out that both companies have had a number of narrow safety restrictions that can come across, as the Times review said, as obsessive. At BP, for instance, walking downstairs with a hot cup of coffee was outlawed, while at Transocean, there was a major effort to outfit all hard hats with chin straps.
Unfortunately, the authors say, the companies missed the big-picture safety issues that led to the rig’s eventual explosion, which killed 11 people.
Furthermore, as Loren C. Steffy writes in “Drowning in Oil: BP and the Reckless Pursuit of Profit,” whenever safety conflicted with profit margins at BP, the latter imperative won out. This was true even after the company’s Texas City refinery blast in 2005 that killed 15 people.
Steffy writes that BP “clung to fundamental principles that emphasize financial performance over safety, not overtly, but subtly.” This culture was reinforced by the belief that technology in place in the Gulf was beyond reproach.
In “A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher,” Joel Achenbach, who covered the disaster for The Washington Post, offers a detailed picture of the lax behavior at BP in the run-up to the event:
There was abundant error in the mix here. Under oath, witnesses admitted that they skimmed documents. They did not recognize that engineering anomalies were shouts of warning. They didn’t speak up in conference calls. They rushed. They behaved as if past results were an accurate prediction of future events. They didn’t take care of the little things, and then the big thing — the Macondo well, drilled by the Deepwater Horizon — didn’t take care of itself.
Achenbach also offers an insider’s tale of the response from the Obama administration, as well as the media’s often sub-par coverage of the disaster.
Related Post:
Rig Owner in Gulf Disaster Fuels Uproar With ‘Safety’ Bonuses
