The Economist: BP’s safety standards are condemned by those ‘closest to the valve’

In their own words…

Mar 22nd 2007

THE Chemical Safety Board, an American government agency that investigates industrial disasters, has long maintained that in the past BP’s bosses did not spend enough time and money on the safety of their employees.

Its latest report on the subject, released on March 20th, was no different: it argued that such failings contributed to an explosion in 2005 at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, which killed 15 people and injured 180. This time around, however, the board also published documents that tell of the employees’ misgivings in their own words:

“For the last ten years, maintenance budget allocation has been controlled centrally by a ‘top down’ allocation of funds,” consultants investigating frequent breakdowns at the refinery wrote in 2002. “Budget cuts were imposed based on the previous year’s spend and did not take into account the specific needs of the refinery…The prevailing culture at the Texas City Refinery was to accept cost reductions without challenge and not to raise concerns when operational integrity was compromised.”

Orders to slash costs by 25% seem “to have been taken literally” by those in charge of Texas City, whereas managers elsewhere “knew how to play the BP game”, an employee notes in an internal e-mail, again in 2002. He refers to a colleague who thinks that “the top level in London need to understand the consequences of their orders.”

An internal audit of Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) throughout BP, released in 2004, found “widespread tolerance of non-compliance with basic HSE rules…poor implementation of HSE management systems…lack of leadership competence and understanding to effectively manage all aspects of HSE…[and] insufficient monitoring of key HSE processes.”

Many workers at Texas City complained that “managers were not nearly worried enough about the ‘real’ dangers and ‘too worried about seat belts’,” according to another set of consultants. Others griped that it was “acceptable to avoid costs related to integrity management because the consequences might occur later, on someone else’s watch.”

In their report, the consultants say they had “never seen such intensity of worry among people ‘closest to the valve’ about the potential for fires, explosions and other catastrophic events”. They had also “never heard so many people say they were personally afraid of injury.”

BP says it was aware of problems at Texas City thanks to such reports, and had already increased spending to fix them when disaster struck. But not all of its own employees seem satisfied with this explanation. Another internal e-mail, written a few weeks after the disaster, plaintively notes: “It’s a shame what had to happen to get us to where we recommended we go several years back.”

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