Bloomberg Businessweek reported on August 26, 2010 that BP Kent Wells, a senior vice president who joined the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill response two days after it began four months ago, said before the joint Coast Guard-Interior Department panel that he didn’t know who was in charge aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig when it exploded in April.
Wells told the federal panel that he was concentrating on hailing the spill and coordinating the cleanup, rather than examining who may have been at fault in the disaster that killed 11 people and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude from the Macando well. Wells, a former chief of shallow-water exploration in the Gulf who has overseen BP’s onshore U.S. natural-gas business since 2007, told the panel he doesn’t know why the company never followed up on the safety audits that showed that Deepwater Horizon was behind on some maintenance and inspections.
U.S. offshore-drilling regulation questioned BP’s safety record as far back as 2003, after a rig fire that caused millions of dollars in damage and a separate incident in which a pressure buildup in an unfinished well prompted the evacuation of workers from a rig, according to a letter entered into evidence today by the panel. The circumstance surrounding these incidents do raise questions about the ability of BP to safely conduct drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico
