“There was a risk identified for a blowout,” said Lamar McKay, the former president of BP America and now chief executive in charge of global upstream operations. “The blowout was an identified risk, and it was a big risk, yes.”
Bob Cunningham, a lawyer for private plaintiffs, tried to pin Mr. McKay down on BP’s responsibility for the 2010 disaster that left 11 workers dead and dumped millions of gallons of oil into the gulf. Mr. Cunningham suggested that BP’s cost-cutting and risk-taking culture were at the heart of the explosion and spill. He pressed Mr. McKay on the fact that a BP report on the accident did not cite management failures as a cause for the accident, while contractors were held responsible.
But Mr. McKay repeatedly responded by saying that while BP was responsible for designing the well, the rig, cement and other contractors shared responsibility for safety on the drilling operations.
“It’s a team effort,” he said. “It’s a shared responsibility to manage the safety and risk.”
The Federal District Court trial in New Orleans is bundling suits brought by the Justice Department, state governments, private business and individual claimants against BP and several of its contractors. Decisions on culpability and damages could be a year or more away, but they are likely to have profound impacts on environmental law and determine the viability of BP as a major oil company with global ambitions.
Mr. McKay testified for about an hour at the end of the day, and will continue on Wednesday. He told the court that there were risks drilling both in deep waters and in shallow waters, but that a blowout could be more damaging in deep waters because it is more difficult to control. There was little if anything in Mr. McKay’s comments that diverged from what BP executives have said in the past.
After the April 2010 spill, internal BP documents showed that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And for months earlier, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.
On June 22, 2009, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.
“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”
At times on Tuesday, Mr. McKay shifted and appeared uncomfortable on the witness stand. He acknowledged that he had never read a textbook on safety system engineering before or after the accident or a safety report written by a BP consultant, who had testified earlier in the day.
Mr. McKay was the second witness to appear in a multiphase trial that will find who was responsible for the accident, whether they were grossly negligent, and how much oil was spilled. He followed Robert Bea, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and former safety systems consultant for BP, who largely blamed the British company’s culture for the accident.
“It’s a culture of every dollar counts,” Mr. Bea said. “It’s a classic failure of management and leadership.”
Under the Clean Water Act, fines against BP could range from $1,100 for every barrel spilled through simple negligence to as much as $4,300 a barrel if the company were found to have been grossly negligent. The federal government has estimated that about 4 million barrels of oil spilled in the accident, meaning liabilities of as much as $5.4 billion to $21 billion. BP has claimed that 3.1 million barrels should be the uppermost spill limit.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 26, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated Lamar McKay’s title when he headed BP America. He was president, not chief executive.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/business/energy-environment/bp-executive-says-explosion-was-known-risk.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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