ANALYSIS THE ACCIDENT AND BP’S RESPONSE Let me start with the accident itself, and our response. Everyone in BP remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. The event was shocking in many dimensions. The human tragedy. The environmental consequences. Our difficulties in stopping the leak on the sea-bed. The protracted media and political firestorm it generated in the months leading up to the elections, both in Washington and the states of the Gulf of Mexico. It quickly became clear that we would need to mount a massive response. From the outset, my predecessor Tony Hayward defined our aims with great clarity. We would do the right thing and stay the course. Ultimately, he said, we would be judged by our response - by what we do, not what we say. That meant stopping the leak, containing and cleaning up the damage, and compensating those affected. It also meant making every effort to understand what happened and learning lessons so that something like this could never happen again. So how are we doing? The first thing to say is that we have stopped the leak and made huge progress in cleaning up the spill.
LEARNING ITS LESSONS Bob Dudley, Group Chief Executive of BP spoke at the recent CBI annual conference in late October. He reflects on the Gulf of Mexico lessons, challenges and damage containment exercise 50
Nov-Dec 2010
After months of work involving more than 150 companies and multiple government agencies, we fitted a sealing cap on the well on July 15th. No oil has flowed into the ocean since that date, and on September 19 the US Government declared the Macondo well finally sealed. Second, our containment and clean-up efforts have gotten results. Our efforts significantly reduced the amount of oil reaching the shore and environmentally sensitive marsh areas. In fact, we believe this has been the largest and most extensive maritime response effort ever undertaken. At its peak it involved the mobilization of 48,000 people, deployment of some 15 million feet of boom (more than 3,000 miles) and co-ordination of nearly