Bp Case

BP didn’t have a great track record when it came to safety issues. Many accidents had occurred before the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, 2010. In March of 2005, fifteen people died and there were one hundred and eighty injuries due to a fire at BP’s largest oil refinery in Texas. Overall, twenty-three people had died at the refinery over thirty years. In July of 2005, BP’s Thunder Horse rig located in the Gulf of Mexico almost sank during Hurricane Dennis. It was concluded that the rig did not almost sink because of the hurricane, but because of the flawed designs in the ballast system (Roberto 6). In 2006, BP’s Prudhoe Bay oil pipeline experienced a major leak. The leak was undetected for many days despite the alarms going off. The neglect and flaws of BP’s practices were definitely seen in that situation. Many other safety issues arose with BP over the years, almost too many to name, which shows how BP had no intention of changing their safety practices and were solely concerned with their revenues.

There were many flawed decisions made by BP and its partners in the case. Among those were more significant flawed decisions. Overall, BP basically ignored all safety precautions while moving forward to speed up the process in deriving oil at the rig to make money instead of losing more of it in the process. BP took too many shortcuts while drilling the Macondo Well. Some of the significant, horrible decisions made by BP and its partners in the case were that they obtained fifteen centralizers of a different variety, they kept working although the cement stability test results of the Macondo Well came back negative the second time (although the cement failed the first stability test and the company didn’t report these results to BP), they redesigned the cement mixture which was hazardous, and then they dismissed the Schlumberger staff rather than having them do the cement testing. This resulted in the cement testing being done by BP...