Maritime Injury Blog

Other oil companies running away from BP’s reckless safety record

Some oil corporations are using the Gulf oil disaster to tout their own safety procedures. In the process, BP looks even more reckless for chasing profits over safety. Four years before the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion which killed 11 workers and began the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Exxon Mobil abandoned a risky well it had already spent $180 million to drill. Their engineers decided that the project in the Gulf of Mexico’s Blackbeard West formation was too unstable to proceed. At the time, Exxon Mobil was ridiculed for not having the “guts to drill.” In hindsight, the decision looks wise and courageous in comparison with the more than $3 billion that BP has so far spent on containment and claims. It appears Exxon learned its lesson from the 1989 Valdez spill, which forced it to vastly upgrade its safety program.

Source: Houston Chronicle