Where the Oil Spill Made Landfall

The NYT provides a great article on BP’s extraction and refining safety history, but even better is the interactive graphic that they developed to detail various aspects of this story:

Click for larger ineractive image.

The killer bit from Nocera’s article, said by then BP CEO John Browne, in 2006, referencing the Prudhoe Bay spill in Alaska:

“We have to get the priorities right,” the chief executive of BP said. “And Job 1 is to get to these things that have happened, get them fixed and get them sorted out. We don’t just sort them out on the surface, we get them fixed deeply.”

But Nocera makes this point that accuses BP of being all talk re: safety issues and wasting the 4 years since Prudhoe:

Do you remember the Prudhoe Bay leak and the Texas City explosion? They were big news at the time, though they quickly faded from the headlines. BP was fined $21 million for the numerous violations that contributed to the Texas City explosion, and it was forced to endure a phased shutdown of its Alaska operations while it repaired the corroded pipeline, which cost it additional revenue.

In retrospect, though, the two accidents represented something else as well: they were a huge gift to the company. The fact that these two accidents — thousands of miles apart, and involving very different parts of BP — took place within a year showed that something was systemically wrong with BP’s culture. Mr. Browne had built BP by taking over other oil companies, like Amoco in 1998, and then ruthlessly cutting costs, often firing the acquired company’s most experienced engineers. Taking shortcuts was ingrained in the company’s culture, and everyone in the oil business knew it.

The accidents should have been the wake-up call BP needed to change that culture. But the mistakes and negligence that took place on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico — which are so profound that everyone I spoke to in the oil business found them truly inexplicable — suggest that the two men never did much more than mouth nice-sounding platitudes.

Which also makes the disaster even more unforgivable than it already is. BP executives had four years to fix the company’s problems before an accident took place that was truly catastrophic. And they blew it.

The infographic is really stunning– be sure to look at all of the tabs and of course, the article is worth every word.