Caught in Barrels

A presidential commission in the U.S. finds who is to blame for the accident in the Gulf of Mexico.

A special White House commission completed an investigation for the reasons behind the accident in the Gulf of Mexico. Based on these findings, the U.S. government will submit claims directly to the three companies for damages caused by oil spill.

The commission came to two main conclusions. First, the accident would have been avoidable if there had not been such gross violations on the part of BP and two other sub-contractors: Transocean, who owned the drilling platform, and Halliburton, the supplier of chemical reagents and drilling cement.

Inconsistencies in their actions led to an emergency situation, so that when the pressure in the well rose to a critical level several times, the necessary analysis procedures were not followed. “Most of the mistakes and oversights at Macondo can be traced back to a single overarching failure — a failure of management. Better management by BP, Halliburton and Transocean would almost certainly have prevented the blowout,” states the conclusion of the report.

However, the committee also recognized that a similar catastrophe would have been unavoidable because of a lack of industry oversight on the part of the government. In this regard the guilt should also be placed on the federal agency charged with regulating deep drilling: the former Minerals Management Service. Commission Chair Bob Graham noted that oil companies were able to choose officials who were more interested in business developments. Another concern is that in the course of the past twenty years the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut.

From this follows the second conclusion of the commission: The catastrophe could be repeated if systemic reforms are not carried out both in state organizations, responsible for regulating deep-water drilling, and also in the companies themselves. Comission Co-Chair William Reilly called upon oil and gas companies to unite in order to establish a single set of safety standards since another catastrophe of this kind would be a serious blow to the entire industry, and therefore each of the companies could be individually affected. The committee also suggested the establishment of a new agency of the interior, which would be responsible for drilling on the continental shelf. Moreover, the director of this agency should be protected from political interference in his duties, similar to the director of the FBI. Efforts to mitigate the effects of the accident were regarded by the commission as insufficient and incompetent. The report highlights that the full damage of the catastrophe may be known only after several years have passed. In light of this, the experts have suggested the establishment of an ecological science agency that would be tasked with the constant monitoring of environmental conditions. The committee suggested that the financial costs for any future accidents should be the responsibility of companies involved. The one piece of good news that can be taken from this is that a massive ecological catastrophe from the oil spill has not occurred. According to experts, all 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the ocean have already been taken care of by bacteria.