Menswear - The Founder

The Founder | Wednesday 23 February 2011
Features
27
In defence of Tony Hayward
Ashley Coates
Under my parents’ front garden in
Bristol there is a lead pipe that once
provided the main water supply to
the house. In 2003, the pipe was
capped off and a new water supply
via a plastic pipe was installed in
its place. The lead pipe lay a foot
underground and was entirely
forgotten about until June last year,
when I went through it with a rotary
hammer. Mains pressure water
began to flow into the front garden.
I decided to use a procedure known
as Top Kill, where the lead pipe
is repeatedly struck with a mallet
until it closes off the leak. With this
having failed and more and more
water pouring out of the ground,
my family began to ask serious
questions about my handling of
the spill that was endangering their
precious front garden.
Day 2 and the leak continues.
With Top-Kill having failed, I initiate
Tap-Kill. Somewhere underground
in a 40 by 40 foot area is a
tap, or a number of taps, that can
be turned off and end the leak. It
takes hours of digging to follow the
pipe until finally I find a tap. There
is great optimism in the household,
but it turns out to be a subsidiary
tap that cannot turn off the main
leak. Things are getting ugly for me,
politically. Day 3. My parents call in
their own experts to assess the situation.
The plumber questions my
original estimates for the amount
of water being leaked into the
front garden, suggesting the spill
was much worse than had been
originally assumed. He goes on to
question the whole way in which
I had gone about dealing with the
spill, starting with Top Kill: ‘You
were doing what with a mallet?’
By Day 4 of the spill my mother
was under intense pressure to be
seen as being in control of the situation.
In a live address to the rest of
the family she said: ‘we will make
Ashley pay for the damage he has
caused to our front garden.’ Earlier
that day I had been overheard
telling a friend that ‘I want my
life back’ and that I ‘would like to
spend some time doing something
other than digging up the front garden
trying to find taps’. This went
down very badly in Bristol. Day 7.
A week since the rotary hammer
had struck the old mains pipe. I
had dug a trench, one foot deep and
over 20 feet long before I found the
stop-cock for the pipe and the leak
finally came to an end.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
1) I’ve lost it, or 2) I am, like so
many other upstart young journalists,
trying to be clever by talking
about politics with reference to
my own life. In fact, both of these
things are true but my experience
over the summer genuinely gave me
some sympathy for former BP CEO,
Tony Hayward.
Like me, Tony Hayward was the
public face of an environmental
disaster, albeit a far larger one
than the one in my front garden.
In May 2010, a few weeks into the
spill, he told a US reporter ‘I want
my life back’ – one of the biggest
PR mistakes of modern times. The
press leapt on it as an insensitive
remark coming from the CEO of
the company that was officially
responsible for the disaster. Two
months later, Tony Hayward was
photographed on a yacht on the Isle
of Wight, prompting anger from
those that felt he should be ‘sorting
out this mess’. The truth was that
Hayward was on the Isle of Wight
supporting his son in a boat race.
It was the first time he had seen his
son in three months. As he said to
BBC’s Money Programme recently:
‘If I had a degree in public relations,
rather than geology, things might
have gone differently for me.’
Another parallel with my summer
and Tony Hayward’s summer
was that every time I did something
that I thought would stop the spill,
it failed. When things break, hitting
the offending object is just one of
those things you do, so bashing
the pipe with a mallet was entirely
sensible given the circumstances.
After this failed, I took the next
logical step and tried to push stuff
into the pipe that would block it
up, stuff like gravel and mud. This
was directly inspired by BP. Top
Kill, where BP pumped mud and
golf balls into the blowout preventer,
seemed silly but it might have
worked were it not for the force of
the oil acting against it. Top Hat,
another scheme I imitated on a
micro-scale, involved placing a
huge ‘hat’ on top of the leaking well
and funnelling the oil up onto a
barge on the surface. For my Top
Hat I used a hose forced onto the
hole in the pipe, but alas, nothing
could be found that would hold it
in place. BP’s ‘hat’ became blocked
by oil deposits before it could be
placed above the leaking blowout
preventer.
The devastation that occurred
in the Gulf Coast last year affected
both marine life and the lives of
communities that depend on the
region for fishing and tourism. It is
right that those responsible are held
to account and that procedures are
changed, but the media storm that
encircled Tony Hayward meant that
all the anger that should have been
directed at a dangerous industry
was in fact directed at someone
who was entirely unequipped to
deal with what was happening
around him. I find it extremely
reassuring that BP’s former CEO is
a geology graduate with poor PR
skills – that is exactly the kind of
person I want to be in charge of a
major oil and gas firm. The worst
thing that could become of the
Deepwater Horizon disaster is if the
people at the top of these companies
are expected to be brilliant
communicators as well as, or at the
expense of, being professionals in a
relevant field.