BP’s safety record is a shocker

Accidents happen – I have had a few myself. But when I read an article from the Sunday Times in London (13th June 2010) that says it all, I am moved to do something about it even if it is only in a small way.

Don’t accidents happen? Is the British company, whose stock is integral to so many British pensions and mutual funds, being used as a handy piñata for an angry nation?
At first blush, the onslaught against BP does seem a little much. But once you examine its recent record, the corner-cutting and recklessness that precipitated this calamity, and the company’s enmeshment with the regulators who are supposed to be keeping watch… well, you tend to get more angry, not less. Take a simple comparison with other multinational oil companies. Over the past three years, the US government department that monitors compliance with health and safetyregulations has cited several companies for negligence or corner-cutting. Sunoco and ConocoPhillips have had eight “egregious, wilful” safety violations apiece. Citgo had two. Exxon had one. BP had …760.
These citations were not minor. As ABC News has reported, they were based on how BP showed “intentional disregard for the requirements of the (law), or showed plain indifference to employee safety and health”. Before the deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 180. An investigation found that BP had violated clear provisions of the Clean Air Act, and paid $50 million in fines.
But the best is yet to come. In rebuilding the plant, BP again failed to follow the procedures for safety, and was fined $87 million last year – the biggest fine of its kind in history. It turned out that there was a “systemic safety problem” at all of BP’s refineries in the US. For good measure, a broken BP pipeline pumped 200 000 gallons of crude oil into the Alaska wilderness in 2006 – the company was found criminally negligent over corrosion in the pipe. No wonder a former special investigator of BP for the Environmental Protection Agency called the company “a convicted serial environmental criminal”.
Worse, it appears perfectly clear that a company that made a profit of £8.75 billion last year can afford to pay the fines, bury the dead…and carry on. And when you look at the preliminary facts about the Deepwater Horizon case, you see exactly the same recklessness. There’s no final word on how the disaster occurred (and we should wait for the full report) but internal BP memos show that there were several red flags before the explosion – from the type of cement used, to the readings on the blowout preventer, to a pressure test that showed a huge abnormality – that were ignored. Even BP’s own investigators had made a “fundamental mistake”.
From this record and the preliminary accounts of the latest disaster, BP does indeed deserve the public whacking it is now receiving – and, in my view, those responsible should be prosecuted and jailed. Whether the latest attempts to cap the well manage to stem the flow or not, what is being done to the Gulf of Mexico is an appalling crime of negligence.

What can I do as an ordinary citizen who owns no BP shares? I can, and I will, boycott BP filling stations.
I have always liked the brand and the cheerful colours and ambiance of its filling stations. I was originally impressed at their BEE efforts in South Africa though these, I believe, failed to meet expectations.

But I now abhor their attitude to the fundamental principles of human life, environmental responsibility and the rule of law.