The Poisoned Well: BP, Safety and Pollution

Louisiana is bracing itself for the largest oil spill in American history, a month after the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico exploded. Crude has already covered 80 miles of the state’s coastline, and promises are being made that the crisis will worsen. British Petroleum, its oil tentacles spread through various political establishments in the world, is demonstrating yet again why it is a dangerous company to know. American law obligates BP to conduct the clean-up. It would also seem that only BP has the equipment to remedy the mess, a distinctly unsatisfactory state of affairs. It is currently undertaking a ‘top kill’ procedure where heavy mud is injected into the well to neutralise subterranean pressure that is forcing the oil upward.

The fact remains that BP’s report card is an abysmal one. Its missives and propaganda leaflets promote a company sound in its green credentials, considerate to its employees and keen to uphold ‘human rights’. Without any sense of irony, their publicity drive promotes their initials as ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Their campaigns have isolated rivals such as Exxon Mobil, and they have been asserting their qualities as a rule abiding citizen of the corporate world. But the lifeblood of the company has, and continues to be, a toxic mixture of petroleum and deception.

Spillage, and for that matter environmental pollution, is not something the company is unfamiliar with. The Prudhoe Bay operation in Alaska had to be shutdown after spillages from a corroded pipeline in 2006. BP demonstrated a certain economy with the truth in terms of the amount spilled, something they have repeated in the current crisis. Evidently, their maintenance standards had proven to be less than satisfactory, and there was some evidence that BP had actually cut back on its maintenance operations. Throughout the last decade, BP proved on more than one occasion that it could violate the standards stipulated by the Clean Air Act. Minor fines, barely able to make a BP official notice, were imposed.

An appalling safety record is also something that stains the company’s resume. An explosion at a refinery in Texas in March 2005, a lethal incident killing 15 workers and injuring 170 others, resulted in fines of $87 million and $21 million respectively for wilful negligence. The US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigations Board was unimpressed by the company’s behaviour, claming in 2007 that, ‘The Texas City disaster was caused by organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation.’ The list is a long and dubious one, littered with fines for safety violations and negligence resulting in the deaths of personnel.

Collusion between government and the petroleum sector has spelled doom for the global environment. BP has demonstrated that it is knee (and bed) deep with government officials too keen to keep the corporate giant in their good books. What is good for BP has been deemed good for the compliant host country.

The agreements surrounding the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline involved an agreement with the Turkish government that effectively transferred power from the government to the company executive over the pipeline. As George Monbiot pointed out in the Guardian (Sep 3, 2002), the contract immunised the company from Turkish laws and policies, effectively granting a cordon sanitaire for company operations. The contract effectively trumped all other domestic considerations.

This is a monster that need not have gotten out of control. As the citizens of Louisiana resign themselves to the impending disaster, that feeling of disgust vented at both the company and its backers in Washington will be understandable. There may not be a ‘silver bullet’ solution, as Obama claims, but there is little reason why such solutions needed to have been found in the first place. The answer, as it always has been with BP, lies in deception and crude.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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