Bp Oil Spill- Ethics

RESEARCH PAPER

On April 20th 2010 the Gulf of Mexico experienced what BP had initially claimed to be a spill with “minimal impact,” 69 days later it progressed into the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Human lives weren’t the only thing lost, millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf in the weeks that followed taking the lives of marine and wildlife habitat along with the extensive impacts on the fishing and tourism industry. Meanwhile, BP downplayed their responsibility for the failure. As the firm failed repeatedly to stop the spill, the public reaction turned to anger (Rudolf).

The problem really began on the night of April 18th as a contractor on the rig warned BP head that if they did not authorize the use of more centralizers on the rig, the well would likely have “a severe gas flow problem.” Rather than using 21 centralizers in order to center the casting in the well, BP installed only 6 in order to save money. At the same time, a meeting was held between officials from BP and Transocean regarding the next steps in sealing the well (Collins). A heated disagreement ensued between Donald Vidrine, the most experienced and top-ranking BP manager assigned to the rig, and Jim Harrell, Transocean’s rig manager. Harrell raised concerns about whether precautionary measures and quality tests were being performed around the pipe to ensure that no gas would escape from the well. Since BP was in charge of the well, the Transocean manager lost the argument (Collins). There was a lack of communication and coordination between Transocean, BP and Halliburton and in recent months had become heated due to schedule delays. In order to save money and get back up to speed many people were doing too many jobs at one time just to get the job done (Werdigier).

Gradually, a number of events occurred that indicted that gas was entering the wells. No action was taken by BP employees and drilling mud continued to be removed from the well. Events...