The Spill

The Spill

The Spill (An essay about the aftermath of the BP Deep Horizon oil spill

BP is one of the largest oil companies in the world. However, 20 years ago was a different story. BP was nowhere near the powerful multi-national corporation we see today. Over the past 2 decades BP grew from a small oil company to an enormous oil giant. It was also during that time where BP had several major incidents at their many different locations. A lot of people died and even more were injured or left without jobs. So where did it all go wrong?
In 1995, Lord John Browne became CEO of British Petroleum (BP). Browne was an engineer and BP manager with a reputation of getting things done. What really got him the job of CEO was his remarkable ability to cut costs and save the bottom line. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s BP bought Amoco, Arco, and five other oil companies. This almost quadrupled BP’s value over night. This was when things started to go downhill for BP. In my opinion, they should not have been allowed to get so big, so fast.
BP’s first incident came in 2004 at their Texas City refinery plant. There was a large fire in an un-manned area of the refinery. After this fire, a new refinery manager took over and conducted an employee survey. What he found out should have been alarming. Most of the employees at the Texas City Refinery were in fear for their lives due to the lack of safety. At this point, emails were exchanged up the ranks but nothing was ever done about it. Looking back into the story, frontline found out that BP knew about the problems at this plant well before any incidents happened. They decided against replacing old blow down drums used to collect volatile liquids and gases in an emergency. All BP had to do was use a little resource mobilization and invest 150,000 dollars to fix this problem. That was 2002. Three years later, the worst case scenario happened. On March 23, 2005, 15 people died and 170 people were injured due to...

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