Waxman Letter To Hayward: BP ‘Carelessness And Complacency Have Inflicted A Heavy Toll’

U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)
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Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce, sent a letter with Rep. Bart Stupak to BP CEO Tony Hayward today, ahead of Hayward’s testimony before the committee. The letter outlines the questions raised by the committee’s investigation into the spill, and asserts that BP’s “carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf.”

Waxman’s letter details the “serious questions” raised regarding BP decisions leading up to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, and includes the assessment by BP’s drilling engineer that it was a “nightmare well.”

Despite this, Waxman wrote, “BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce
costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.”

According to the letter, the Committee is focusing on five decisions made by BP that contributed to the explosion:

(I) the decision to use a well design with few barriers to gas flow; (2) the failure to use a sufficient number of “centralizers” to prevent channeling during the cement process; (3) the failure to run a cement bond log to evaluate the effectiveness of the cement job; (4) the failure to circulate potentially gas-bearing drilling muds out of the well; and (5) the failure to secure the wellhead with a lockdown sleeve before allowing pressure on the seal from below. The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety.

Waxman concludes: “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense. If this is what happened, BP’s carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig.”

The full letter can be read here (.pdf).

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