New York Times reported September 8, 2010 the oil giant BP said Wednesday in its internal report that a series of failures involving a number of companies ultimately 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.”
The report was conducted by the company’s safety chief ,Mark Bly, and a team of 50 BP safety professionals found a complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces at fault. The 193 page report deflects attention away from BP and back onto its contractors, especially Transocean, which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which performed the cement jobs on the well.
The report, which took about four months to complete, focuses less on decisions that BP made in designing and drilling the well than on what rig workers, mostly from Transocean, did after the blowout recurred. The report tries to undermine the notion that BP acted with gross negligence. Among the most significant conclusions, the report said that the blowout came up the center of the pipe and not up the outside of the well casing.
If true, the finding is significant because it plays down the importance of certain BP decisions that have been criticized as negligent. On such decision was Bp’s choice of a type of well casing that internal documents indicated the company knew was cheaper, but more risky. Another such decision was BP’s use of fewer-than-advised centralizers devices that are meant to keep the casing properly positioned.
In recent testimony, BP executives have pointed out the blowout preventer did not go through an extensive certification as required by federal regulations, a fact that was earlier documented in internal Transocean equipment reports. BP did not have a chance to analyze the blowout preventer before the company released its report. The failed device was removed from the sea on Saturday and sent to a NASA facility in New Orleans where federal investigators are waiting to inspect it.
