Chapter 5 - The Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
Summary
BP’s Macondo Well
The explosion of the rig was a disaster that resulted from BP’s culture of privileging profits over prudence.
Lanny Breuer, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Criminal DivisionThe immediate causes of the Macondo well blowout can be traced to a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.
National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling[T]he extent to which a company is a good social citizen is less a function of its managers’ moral compass than of their competence and perspective on what constitutes a good business model. … If they develop badly thought-out incentives and enforce them blindly, there will be unintended consequences, something the financial sector has illustrated on a grand scale in recent years.
Tom Bergin, Spills and Spin: The Inside Story of BPAfter nearly three years and tens of millions of dollars in investigation, the government needs a scapegoat. No one should take any satisfaction in this indictment of an innocent man. This is not justice.
Shaun Clarke and David Gerger, attorneys for Robert Kaluza, BP well site leaderThe Well from Hell
The gigantic derrick loomed 20 stories above the sea, the centerpiece of a $350 million, 30,000-ton drilling rig named the Deepwater Horizon. Stationed 49 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, it was owned by the largest rig provider in the world, a company called Transocean, and leased by one of the biggest oil companies in the world, BP (formerly British Petroleum) for the princely sum of $1 million/day. Years earlier, BP and its partners, Anadarko Petroleum and Moex USA, had paid the federal government $34 million for oil and gas drilling rights to a nine-square-mile underwater plot named Macondo after the mythical village in the Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a truly bizarre twist, BP had donated the opportunity to name the well to the United Way, which in turn sold it to a group of Colombians who were fans of the author and named the well to commemorate him.
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- Why Not Jail?Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, pp. 149 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014