CONGRESSIONAL investigators say documents uncovered as part of their inquiry into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have raised “serious questions about the decisions made by BP in the days and hours before the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon” drilling rig.
In a letter sent to BP chief executive Tony Hayward, the Democratic leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee say that in the days and hours leading up the April 20 explosion, BP appears “to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure”.
The letter amounts to a warning to Mr Hayward that he will face tough questioning on Thursday when he testifies for the first time before Congress.
BP declined to respond to the specifics raised in the letter. “Tony Hayward will be testifying on Thursday before the full committee, and we would expect that the committee will raise these issues in the hearing,” said a BP spokeswoman, Anne Kolton.
The letter, written by committee chairman Henry Waxman and oversight subcommittee chairman Bart Stupak, advises Mr Hayward to bring other officials and technical experts to answer an array of pointed questions under oath about specifics of the well’s design, safety measures, and operations on the Deepwater Horizon rig.
The letter cites evidence that “at the time of the blowout, the Macondo well was significantly behind schedule” and says those delays appear “to have created pressure to take shortcuts to speed finishing the well.”
The letter quotes from an email message sent between two BP engineers six days before the explosion in which one drilling engineer calls the project a “nightmare well which has everyone all over the place”.
The politicians then cite what they call “five crucial decisions” that BP made in designing and completing that may have led to vulnerabilities in the well’s design. “The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety,” the letter says.
Be the first to comment