‘Bad management’ led to BP spill

The presidential panel said BP did not have “adequate controls” in place

The companies involved in the BP oil spill had made decisions to cut costs and save time that contributed to the disaster, a US panel has found.

In a 48-page report, the presidential commission wrote that the failures were “systemic” and likely to recur without industry and government reform.

But it said BP did not have adequate controls in place to ensure safety.

The April blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 people and caused one of the worst oil spills in history.

The Macondo well, about a mile under the sea’s surface, eventually leaked millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, damaging hundreds of miles of environmentally sensitive coastline.

The new report criticises BP, which owned the Macondo well, Halliburton, which managed the well sealing operation, and Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig, and blames inadequate government oversight and regulation.

“Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blow-out clearly saved those companies significant time (and money),” the presidential panel wrote.

“BP did not have adequate controls in place to ensure that key decisions in the months leading up to the blow-out were safe or sound from an engineering perspective.”

The findings came in the final report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which President Barack Obama convened in May to investigate the root causes of the spill and recommend changes to industry and government policy.

Though it lacked subpoena power, the panel reviewed thousands of pages of documents, interviewed hundreds of witnesses, and in the autumn conducted a series of public hearings.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Bob Graham, former Florida governor and a co-chairman of the commission, said the findings showed the blow-out was avoidable.

“This disaster likely would not have happened had the companies involved been guided by an unrelenting commitment to safety first,” he said.

In a months-long investigation, the panel found that mistakes and “failures to appreciate risk” compromised safeguards “until the blow-out was inevitable and, at the very end, uncontrollable”.

BP’s “fundamental mistake”, the panel wrote, was failing to exercise proper caution over the job of sealing the well with cement.

“Based on evidence currently available, there is nothing to suggest that BP’s engineering team conducted a formal, disciplined analysis of the combined impact of these risk factors on the prospects for a successful cement job,” the report reads.

Specific risks the report identifies include a flawed design for the cement used to seal the bottom of the well; a test of that seal identified problems but was “incorrectly judged a success”; and the workers’ failure to recognise the first signs of the impending blow-out.

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