The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

366 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
equipment malfunctions and overfilling a pressurized tower. Process
safety is systemic. It focuses on design and engineering, thorough regular
inspections, diligent maintenance, effective alarms and continuous
training. Texas City was a process safety accident, the report said. Under
no illusion that the problems were limited to BP, the panel urged the entire
industry to take its recommendations to heart. 6
BP’s deadly error had been interpreting a significant improvement in
personal safety rates as proof of vigilance. High turnover of plant managers
made things worse, Gorton says. So did the emphasis on the bottom
line. The neglect, tragically, was not benign. “BP has not demonstrated
that it has effectively held executive management and line managers and
supervisors, both at the corporate level and at the refinery level, accountable
for process safety performance at its five U.S. refineries,” the Baker
report concluded. Browne promised to implement the panel’s recommendations,
saying, “BP gets it, and I get it, too.” Gorton said that was encouraging,
but he had his doubts. 7
Tony Hayward soon succeeded Lord Browne in the wake of a classic
British sex-and-perjury scandal that supplied the last straw. Given that
distraction and the transition at the top, did BP take seriously the panel’s
admonition that process safety leadership—especially integrated auditing
of risks—was Job 1 for its entire executive management team, including
its board of directors?
On April 20, 2010, a spectacular blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon
drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers. Before the underwater
wellhead was finally capped on July 15, it had gushed 206 million
gallons of crude. Cleanup costs and compensation at this writing top
$40 billion. Some predict the eventual bill will be triple that. Long-term
ecological impacts are unknown. The culpability of BP and its partners,
Transocean and Halliburton, became a blur of finger-pointing. A contractor
testified that he warned BP that it risked gas leaks in the well if it cut
back on stabilizers for the pipe into the wellhead. “We’re talking the culture
of BP,” Gorton said. “If this was going to happen to an oil company,
it would happen to BP.” 8
A seven-member commission appointed by President Obama issued a
report that emphasized the importance of process safety “from the highest
levels on down” as opposed to a “culture of complacency.” It implicated
the entire oil and gas exploration and production industry, and
called for “systemic reforms.” 9
It was the Baker Report in a new dust jacket. Two blue-ribbon panels
in the space of four years, and the only thing that had changed was the