The BP Legacy

I have been reading the transcript of the "Inquiry into the Deepwater Horizon Gulf Coast Oil Spill", held by the House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Energy and Commerce, on 12 May 2010. Digging past the Congressional showboating ( Tip: skip any sentence containing the phrase: "Our Founding Fathers" ) a frightening picture of corporate malfeasance on the part of BP begins to emerge.
From the transcript:

• Three years ago almost to the day, this subcommittee held a hearing into British Petroleum disasters at Texas City and on the North Slope of Alaska. The 205 Texas City Refinery explosion resulted in the death of 15 workers and injured more than 170 people.
• As a result of that accident and BP's failure to correct potential hazards faced by employees at Texas City, OSHA has twice slapped BP with record-setting fines totaling more than $100 million. Several reports criticized management at the Texas City facility, including BP's own 207 report of the Management Accountability Project, which stated, "A culture that evolved over the years seemed to ignore risk, tolerated noncompliance, and accepted incompetence."
• In March of 2006, BP discovered their pipeline on Alaska's North Slope had spilled more than 200,000 gallons of oil on the tundra, making it the largest spill in North Slope history. Our hearings discovered that significant cost-cutting measures resulted in decreased maintenance and inspections of the pipeline, and BP's management culture deterred individuals from raising safety concerns.
• Since our last hearing, BP has experienced continual problems on the North Slope. September 29, 2008, an eight-inch high pressure gas line at the Y-Pad location separated, sending three pieces of pipe to the tundra. One segment of the pipe landed 900 feet from the pipeline. Roughly 30 minutes later, a second and unrelated incident occurred on the S-Pad where there was a gas release.
• January 15, 2009, a disk cleaning pig became lodged and lost in the 34-inch oil transit line during de-oiling, allowing gas to pass around the pig and travel through Skid 50 to Pump Station number one, causing a significant venting of gas into the atmosphere and a complete shutdown of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
• October 10, 2009, at the Centro Compressor Plant, low-pressure flare staging valves were stuck closed, causing gas to travel to the back-up, low-pressure serve valves, which activated, caused the gas to vent to the atmosphere, which could have caused an explosion.
• November 28, 2009, an 18-inch, three-phase common line near Lisburne Production Center carrying a mixture of crude oil, produced water and natural gas ruptured, spraying its contents over an estimated 84,000 square feet.
• In addition to these pipeline incidents, there have been personal injury acts since where employees have been seriously injured or killed, as was the tragic case of Mike Fallin on November 18 when he was crushed between a pipeline and a truck.

All of these incidents occur after BP's failure, as the majority stakeholder in the Aleska Consortium, to adequately prepare for the oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, that resulted when the Exxon Valdez went aground in 1989. We saw how they conducted business twenty years ago and yet we allowed them to continue in this manner unchecked.
Shame on us.