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NY Times November 8, 2010 Spill Investigator Sees No Sign That Cost Trumped Safety By JOHN M. BRODER WASHINGTON — The lead investigator for the presidential panel investigating the BP oil spill said on Monday that he had found no evidence that anyone involved in drilling the doomed well had taken safety shortcuts to save money. Fred H. Bartlit Jr., a prominent trial lawyer hired to lead the panel’s inquiry, disputed the findings of other investigators, including members of Congress, who have charged that BP and its main partners, Transocean and Halliburton, had cut corners to speed completion of the well, which cost $1.5 million a day to drill. “To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” Mr. Bartlit said on Monday. The statement came near the beginning of a detailed presentation Mr. Bartlit gave on the causes of the April 20 disaster on a drilling rig off the Louisiana coast, which killed 11 workers and led to the biggest offshore oil spill in American history. “A lot has been said about this, but we have not found a situation where we can say a man had a choice between safety and dollars and put his money on dollars,” Mr. Bartlit said. “If anybody has anything else to say about that, we’re happy to hear it.” Mr. Bartlit’s presentation resembled a prosecutor’s opening argument in a major criminal trial. He used elaborate graphics to illustrate the complex technology used on the BP well, known as the Macondo well, as he walked the seven-member presidential commission and an audience of lawyers, company officials and journalists through his preliminary findings. He said, however, that his purpose was to explain, not to accuse. “We are not assigning blame,” Mr. Bartlit said. “We are not making any legal judgments on liability, negligence or gross negligence or any legal issues at all. It’s a hard thing to do. Our effort is to look at cause, not liability.” President Obama appointed the commission, led by Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator and governor from Florida, and William K. Reilly, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H. W. Bush. The panel’s tasks are to find the root causes of the accident and to make recommendations for new regulations and drilling practices by the middle of January. The first part of Mr. Bartlit’s presentation focused on BP’s well design and the repeated problems that BP and Halliburton encountered in preparing the well for cementing, a process meant to keep oil and gas, which are under high pressure in the well, from exploding up the well bore. The commission staff has concluded that problems with the cement job were a major cause of the well disaster, although Mr. Bartlit emphasized on Monday that a deepwater well was a complicated system and that no single error or flaw was solely responsible for the disaster. Mr. Bartlit said that he could not reach any conclusions about one critical component in the well, the blowout preventer, which is supposed to be the last line of defense against a well going out of control. The blowout preventer that was on the Macondo well is in the hands of federal agents as possible evidence in criminal and civil trials. The government has hired a Norwegian engineering firm to examine it and determine whether and how it may have failed. Mr. Bartlit said that his investigation would not be complete until he had the results of that study. Monday’s hearing also did not resolve the question of whether BP made a fatal error by failing to install a sufficient number of “centralizers,” devices used to keep the drill casing centered within the well bore. Halliburton, the cement contractor, has said that the decision on centralizers was part of the reason the cement job failed. BP disputes that contention. But it was clear from internal BP documents presented at the hearing that BP’s well design contributed to the accident, because it did not allow for sufficient barriers to the upward explosion of oil and gas from the 18,000-foot-deep well. Mr. Bartlit also warned the companies involved to refrain from “bickering” and from making self-serving statements intended to avoid liability in what will probably become an epic legal battle over the costs of the disaster. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
