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June 20, 2010
The media continues to provide images of dead wildlife, fouled marshes and beaches, losses to owners of employees and small businesses, and continuing reports that BP is putting the health of cleanup workers at risk by continuing to refuse to allow respirators to be used and providing inadequate safety training in the face of evidence of health risks.
BP has continued to deny reckless behaviour towards safety ---cutting corners to save money---to a hostile House energy and commerce committee. Despite BPs’ awful record of safety risks, the CEO, Tony Hayward, knew zilch--he wasn't party to individual decisions.
Dave Brown
It's the standard corporate defence--"I don't recall." That did nothing to assuage the anger in Congress. Hayward's stonewalling was partly an attempt to avoid admitting liability, with both civil and criminal charges a possibility. It has been estimated that the total cost of the spill could range from $40bn to $100bn, much more than the $20bn that BP has agreed to ringfence into an escrow fund.
Industry experts warned that the out-of-control well will go on spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the next two years or more if all attempts to contain or plug the gusher fail. The US government's present flow estimates is now up to 60,000 barrels a day or more. A relief well is the only sure way of stopping the gusher. Is this a case of gross negligence?
The problem for BP in this conflict of public good versus toxic industry is that it has not been straightforward with the government or the American people about the size of this spill. Ed Markey, the Democratic head of the House sub-committee on energy and the environment has said that "first they said it was 1,000 barrels, then they said it was 5,000 barrels, now we are up to 100,000 barrels."
So BP, with its horrid safety record, has misrepresented its commitment to turning a new leaf. Many however, are defending BP (corporate capitalism) by blaming the regulators. True, they didn’t do their job. But BP still bears primary responsibility for the oil spill.
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BP seemed to believe its cover-up strategy would work: that by shooing people away from beaches, putting gag orders on clean-up workers, and preventing scientists from estimating the size of the leak, it could somehow reduce the bad PR and damages. And as they always do, the cover-up simply made BP look even worse.