On the predictability or not of the BP Gulf of Mexico oilspill in 2010

Nick Allen says:
From my understanding - nothing first hand - Lord Browne bashed together a lot of oil companies during his acquisition trail, becoming the blue eyed boy of the city. However, little attention was paid to system integration, standardisation, development of a safety and engineering culture. It is therefore unsurprising not only that the accident happened - given the complexity of the task they were undertaking - but that BP did not have adequate embedded capability, robustness of systems and processes to deal with it when it did occur.

The accident was the culture in which the blow occurred - not the blow out. They could have put that right - which to Tony Hayward's credit he was attempting to. Having said that, culture change is a slow and mysterious tanker that drifts on unseen tides and currents and is not easily controllable from the wheelhouse. The question to ask is could they have done more to prevent it and been more responsive once it occurred?

Madeline McGill says:
As I understand it a similar event had occurred a few months earlier in the North Sea at one of BP’s/Transoceon’s sites when the capping procedure had worked effectively. Sadly I do not have date/time/place to back up my assertion which was, I think, gleaned from a news bulletin heard when driving sometime in the last couple of weeks.

John Milner says:
I’m not inclined to see this as a black swan. It appears to be more of a common mode failure which is a concept known to engineers for many years. Pilots describe similar circumstances as “when the holes in the cheese line up”.

If you design systems with redundancy for reliability they have to have relationships which imply that a failure in one or more components doesn’t cause a system failure, in other words component failures (events) must be statistically independent of each other.

In the BP case it looks more as if a series of apparently unrelated events actually accumulated failures until a catastrophe occurred. Of course we are looking here at systems components both human and technical.

As pilots know too well Human Factors are the biggest risk and need to be closely managed through rigorous adherence to procedures developed in the light of science, engineering and experience.

Mike Johnston says:
I’ve just read your December newsletter, and was interested in the question you raise about the BP oil spill. I thought you may find of interest the attached presentation and lecture I’ve been giving for a couple of years. It looks at the issue you’ve highlighted – namely, can we learn from previous crises to identify common causes?

This is an issue that had been bugging me for a while, when I happened across a couple of interesting articles on epidemiology. And what do you know, epidemiology had been grappling with the same issue. A couple of guys, Rothman and Greenland, published a fascinating paper in 2005, which, from the point of view of crisis management, started to ring so many bells for me. I looked at 3 fairly well documented and analysed crises, and found commonality of causes. But I also discovered something very interesting. In all 3, the causes had been in play for some time before the incident occurred, and it was only when what I’ve called a “point of serendipity” was reached, that the causes came together to trigger a crisis.

Although a full enquiry into the BP crisis has yet to be published, I expect to see some of the causal mechanisms that I’ve identified as playing a part.

Andrew Black says:
Just a quick reply about oil spills and BP . The unfortunate series of errors that led to the Gulf oil spill is surely something that oil companies were aware of, yet didn’t make part of their central planning. And it is a good question as to whether they should ? These are, happily, relatively rare events. As such, I would have thought that it might be possible to take out insurance against this kind of eventuality – suitably re-insured through Lloyds.

Now, it may be that the premium for such insurance is very high, in which case the company might have realized that it is better either to have some kind of a “captive insurance” group, which took the premium and simply saved/invested it as an insurance company would have done. Alternatively, which is what happened in this case, hold sufficient reserves against a number of rainy, or “oily” days. BP was able to inject a lot of cash (US$ 20 billion) or so, pretty quickly. In so doing they had to sell some assets that were clearly “non core” to their operation. In some respects a pretty good response, I would have thought. Would a government, or state owned oil corporation have managed to do any better ? I wonder !

Disputes about who will ultimately pay what, to whom, will doubtless take years to settle, and make some lawyers very rich. Is the idea of a scenario-based approach to try and “keep the lawyers poor” and the fish alive??

Given the levels of expertise in the industry, and their own desire to avoid i) losing a lot of oil, ii) losing their reputation, I would have thought that they would have various plans in place to deal with emergencies of a similar nature. And if not, then there will have been a lot of scurrying around to plug any gaps in their armoury. That is not the same as being able to prevent such events from occurring, but then how could you ? Absolute “certainty” in response to an event like this, would only arise if there was a virtual ban on such deep water drilling. And this would raise a host of other questions. Perhaps there was a touch of complacency in their response ? Perhaps an unwillingness to admit how serious the situation was ? And perhaps also, un-clarity in understanding just how much risk they were taking on.