[THS] BP Supervisor Was Fired For Expressing Safety Concerns

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

BP Supervisor Was Fired For Expressing Safety Concerns
Lucia Graves

"From my experience working in the industry for over 30 years, I have never seen
these kinds of problems with other companies," said Abbott. "Of course, everyone
and every company will make mistakes occasionally. I have never seen another
company with the kind of widespread disregard for proper engineering and safety
procedures that I saw at BP... BP has a culture which simply does not follow safety
regulations. From what I saw [at Atlantis], that culture has not changed."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/bp-supervisor-fired-for-e_n_616400.html

Ken Abbott, a former project control supervisor on BP's Atlantis deepwater oil rig, was
fired in
2009 after expressing concerns about the safety of the operation.
"I got a lot of pressure from the lead engineers and from the managers saying,
'Don't do that; don't push so much; we don't want to mess with that,'" Abbott told
HuffPost in an interview Wednesday. "I feel like the real reason I was fired was
because I was trying to raise a safety issue, and you know BP has a long history of
getting rid of people who try to raise safety issues. I was one of those victims."
"Management sets the tone," Abbott added. "If they think that production is more
important than safety, then that's the tone of the company, and that was the tone at
Atlantis."
In his testimony on the Hill on Thursday, BP CEO Tony Hayward repeatedly said that
he didn't make any design choices. "I wasn't involved in any of the decision-making,"
he told Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), adding that there were clearly discussions
about rig safety among the well's engineering team.
"You're not taking responsibility," Waxman said. "You're kicking the can down the
road and acting like you have nothing to do with... this company. I find that
irresponsible."
Congressional investigators recently obtained internal BP documents showing that BP
chose a well design for Deepwater Horizon that was riskier but $3 million cheaper.
The story sounds familiar to Abbott who had his safety recommendations for Atlantis
vetoed by BP management for fiscal reasons -- the estimated cost was $2 million.
In September of 2008, Abbott was warned by his predecessor, Barry Duff, that
"hundreds if not thousands" of Atlantis's documents had not been approved or
finalized, and that it could "lead to catastrophic Operator errors."
Duff had reported these concerns to management, but nothing had happened.
"They didn't want to spend the money to fix it," Abbott said. "I think [Duff] was
unhappy."
For months, Abbott worked to obtain BP engineer-approved drawings with little, if
any, progress. "The more I insisted that we had to develop or obtain them, the more
unpopular I became," he said. Hostilities mounted until he was fired on February 5,
2009.
"I was told that it was a reduction in force due to a slowdown on the Atlantis project,
but I was the only person laid off," Abbott said. "Three weeks before, the BP
managers of Atlantis had told the whole rig nobody was going to be laid off, that
there was plenty of work to do."
Hayward said under oath Thursday that he feels "a great deal of responsibility" for
the Deepwater Horizon explosion this April that triggered the Gulf Coast catastrophe.
"The fire and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon never should have happened and
I'm deeply sorry that it did," Hayward said.
Rep. Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican, was underwhelmed by Hayward's claim
that the CEO didn't know anything about the well in question, including safety issues
that had been raised repeatedly.
"With due respect," said Hayward, "We drill hundreds of wells around the world."
"That's what scares me right now," said Burgess.
Abbott said he thinks BP's lax attitude toward safety regulations extends beyond
Atlantis.
"From my experience working in the industry for over 30 years, I have never seen
these kinds of problems with other companies," said Abbott. "Of course, everyone
and every company will make mistakes occasionally. I have never seen another
company with the kind of widespread disregard for proper engineering and safety
procedures that I saw at BP... BP has a culture which simply does not follow safety
regulations. From what I saw [at Atlantis], that culture has not changed."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here's an expert (albeit outsider) assessment of what's really happening in the Gulf,
and the all-too-likely prognosis, from the Oil Drum:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6593/648967

Editors' note for first-time visitors: What follows is a comment from a The Oil Drum reader. To read what The Oil Drum staff members are saying about the Deepwater Horizon Spill, please visit the front page. (Were the US government and BP more forthcoming with information and details, the situation would not be giving rise to so much speculation about what is actually going on in the Gulf. This should be run more like Mission Control at NASA than an exclusive country club function--it is a public matter--transparency, now!)

OK let's get real about the GOM oil flow. There doesn't really seem to be much info on TOD that furthers more complete understanding of what's really happening in the GOM.
As you have probably seen and maybe feel yourselves, there are several things that do not appear to make sense regarding the actions of attack against the well. Don't feel bad, there is much that doesn't make sense even to professionals unless you take into account some important variables that we are not being told about. There seems to me to be a reluctance to face what cannot be termed anything less than grim circumstances in my opinion. There certainly is a reluctance to inform us regular people and all we have really gotten is a few dots here and there...
First of all...set aside all your thoughts of plugging the well and stopping it from blowing out oil using any method from the top down. Plugs, big valves to just shut it off, pinching the pipe closed, installing a new bop or lmrp, shooting any epoxy in it, top kills with mud etc etc etc....forget that, it won't be happening..it's done and over. In fact actually opening up the well at the subsea source and allowing it to gush more is not only exactly what has happened, it was probably necessary, or so they think anyway.
So you have to ask WHY? Why make it worse?...there really can only be one answer and that answer does not bode well for all of us. It's really an inescapable conclusion at this point, unless you want to believe that every Oil and Gas professional involved suddenly just forgot everything they know or woke up one morning and drank a few big cups of stupid and got assigned to directing the response to this catastrophe. Nothing makes sense unless you take this into account, but after you do...you will see the "sense" behind what has happened and what is happening. That conclusion is this:
The well bore structure is compromised "Down hole".
That is something which is a "Worst nightmare" conclusion to reach. While many have been saying this for some time as with any complex disaster of this proportion many have "said" a lot of things with no real sound reasons or evidence for jumping to such conclusions, well this time it appears that they may have jumped into the right place...