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The White House oil spill commission said Monday that it found no evidence to support accusations that the largest offshore oil spill in the US history happened because workers for BP and its partners cut corners to save money, mostly blaming the incident on a series of on-site misjudgments. "To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety," the commission's chief counsel, Fred Bartlit, said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill. Bartlit said the panel agreed with about 90 percent of the findings released this summer after BP's investigation of the incident. BP's report assigned much of the blame for the accident to its drilling partners. Bartlit also said BP's well design was not inherently faulty, although it did have some impact on the drilling project's operations. While the commission has no legal authority to carry out policies or punishment, the findings could help BP's tarnished reputation, although the panel was still very critical of BP's procedures to plug the well prior to the explosion, saying the oil giant took unnecessary risks. Some lawmakers and critics have accused BP and other companies involved in drilling the well of sacrificing safety for monetary savings in the run-up to the rig explosion that killed 11 workers. "What is fully evident, from BP's pipeline spill in Alaska and the Texas city refinery disaster, to the Deepwater Horizon well failure, is that BP has a long and sordid history of cutting costs and pushing the limits in search of higher profits," US Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a statement. Bartlit said the commission's preliminary investigation found no evidence that individual workers took safety risks to save money, and that it instead found that a series of factors ultimately contributed to the explosion. Still, Bartlit emphasized that his probe did not focus on company culture and that not everything done on the rig was safe. Workers for BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, also misread a critical negative-pressure test of cement used in an attempt to plug the well. The panel's investigators said workers may have misinterpreted the test because neither the companies nor the government had standard procedures for handling negative-pressure tests. Reuters |
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