BP Turning into the Big Bad Wolf

(Aired on May 26, 2010)

Between right now and the time I finish this editorial, 7 barrels of oil will have flowed from the Deepwater Horizon spill into the Gulf of Mexico.  And that's if you use numbers provided by British Petroleum.  If you use numbers being put forward by other experts, the spill is increasing by 20-times that rate.  That means during the duration of this editorial, 140 barrels of oil will have spilled.

Today, BP started pouring heavy mud into the wellhead to see if it can stem the flow.  That would be followed by concrete, and then supposedly we'd never hear of that well again.  It is becoming more and more unbelievable that safeguards weren't in place to prevent the environmental catastrophe that continues to unfold.  As I mentioned shortly after the well explosion happened, the installation of a $500,000 acoustic switch likely would have prevented this spill.

But then again, the lack of regard for anything but pure profit seems to be what BP is all about.  Five years ago, BP was sued when some of its employees died in a refinery explosion in Texas.  It was alleged that the company was housing employees in structures that were vulnerable to explosion during the workday.  As a lawyer was researching the suit, he found an internal BP memo that crassly plugged the employees lives into a cost benefit framework.  In other words, each lost life was assigned a dollar value and measured against the cost of protecting that life by upgrading the structure.  The memo used the Three Little Pigs as a metaphor - in other words, what would it cost to build a straw house, a wood house, or a brick house?

In the end, the memo concluded that fully protecting its employees lives was not worth the lost profits the company would incur.  BP fundamentally reneged on its responsibility to protect its employees, and now it has done the same for protecting the environment.

Having said that, there's another 140 barrels of oil down the drain.