A HUSH fell over the Congress hearing room as Tony Hayward, the embattled chief executive officer of BP, walked in.
" God Save the Queen," the American journalist next to me muttered. A swarm of photographers closed in on the boyish Englishman with dark circles under his eyes. Camera shutters clicked and whirred. Until the chairman's gavel sounded, Hayward whispered inaudibly with six colleagues. In their dark suits, they looked like mourners at a funeral.
For over an hour, while an additional 112,847 gallons of crude gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, Hayward sat impassively, sipping his water, taking a few notes on the large mahogany table where he sat alone, facing his inquisitors.
In the most bizarre moment of the hearing, Hayward blushed when Joe Barton, a poker-faced representative from Texas, apologised to him. “I am ashamed of what happened yesterday in the White House,” said Barton, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee. “I think it is a tragedy that a private corporation can be subjected to a $20 billion shakedown . . . a $20 billion slush fund.”
There were groans from the back of the room. Democratic congressmen and the White House quickly condemned Barton for his comments about the compensation fund that President Obama and BP executives agreed to create on Wednesday.
When Tony Hayward became CEO of BP in 2007, he promised to “focus like a laser on safe and reliable operations”. Throughout the hearing, that phrase was used as an accusation by congressmen, and as an alibi by Hayward.
Representative Henry Waxman, who chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said “BP’s corporate complacency is astonishing”. In 30,000 pages of documents, including Hayward’s emails and those of executives directly responsible for the well “there is not a single email or document that shows you paid even the slightest attention to the dangers at this well”, Waxman said. “Senior officials . . . were apparently oblivious to what was happening.”
The drilling engineer’s description of a “nightmare well”, fears among BP employees that the cement seal would not hold, and warnings from the subcontractor Halliburton that substantial amounts of explosive gas were escaping “fell on deaf ears”, Waxman noted.
The company's corporate attitude was summed up in an email from the chief drilling engineer, who knew of the dangers and the company's decision to ignore them: "who cares, it's done, end of story, will probably be fine", the engineer wrote. Note the word probably.
“BP cut corner after corner to save a million dollars here and a few hours or days there. Now the whole Gulf Coast is paying the price,” Waxman said.
Representative Bart Stupak, who chairs the subcommittee on oversight and investigations, read from a September 2007 article in the Guardian newspaper: “Assurance is killing us,” Mr Hayward told US staff, noting that too many people were engaged in decision-making leading to excessive cautiousness, something that critics of its safety performance in the US might question.
Throughout Hayward’s day of torment, representatives repeated the litany of BP’s pre-April 2010 sins: the explosion that killed 15 workers and injured another 170 at the Texas City refinery in 2005; a pipeline spill due to poor maintenance that dumped 200,000 gallons of crude into the Alaskan wilderness in 2007. In the past five years, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined BP 760 times for “egregious and willful violations” of safety codes. Competitors clocked up between one and eight violations each.
Over and over, Hayward repeated that he had “focused on safe, reliable operations”, that he had “made major changes in the last three years”. Were not all of the technical decisions that led to the explosion – disregarding pressure tests; the choice of inferior well casing; ignoring gas leaks; using 16 instead of the requisite 21 “centralisers” to drop the well casing; failure to circulate mud throughout the well and the absence of a “lockdown sleeve” – dictated by BP’s desire to save time and money, representatives asked. “I wasn’t part of the decision-making process on this well,” Hayward repeated. “I can’t recall . . . I can’t say . . . I don’t know . . .”