Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
ABC News reports on the abysmal safety and environmental record of British Petroleum. It's actually worse -- far worse -- than I could have possibly imagined.
In two separate disasters prior to the Gulf oil rig explosion, 30 BP workers have been killed, and more than 200 seriously injured.In the last five years, investigators found, BP has admitted to breaking U.S. environmental and safety laws and committing outright fraud. BP paid $373 million in fines to avoid prosecution.
It gets worse:
BP's safety violations far outstrip its fellow oil companies. According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the "egregious, willful" violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).The violations are determined when an employer demonstrated either an "intentional disregard for the requirements of the [law], or showed plain indifference to employee safety and health."
OSHA statistics show BP ran up 760 "egregious, willful" safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.
I think we've reached the point where we can conclude that BP is not a corporation so much as it is a criminal enterprise. When you rack up 97% of the willful violations in your industry, you ought to be in prison.
Politics
Comments
And yet we are "depending" on BP to stop the oil flow? I understand that this is specialized technology that the government may not have in house. But BP is not the only oil company drilling in deep water. In fact, others are drilling even deeper. Why not open a competition with a $10 billion prize (to be paid for with fines against BP) to any entity-whether US or foreign that can stop the flow? If BP wants to complain about that, F-them!
Posted by: JusticeLeague | June 3, 2010 9:46 AM
I just wish that the media would report on these violations before they lead to disaster. There are plenty of companies besides oil companies and coal mines that are subject to regulations, and too many of them violate safety laws, but nobody cares until something really bad happens. And I really wish that we could all learn from others' past mistakes, rather than giggle about ladder safety training and complaining about the requirement to label all chemicals.
Posted by: catgirl | June 3, 2010 10:26 AM
I think that BP is toast. The stock has dropped so much they are a take-over target already. If it drops much more, they very likely will be taken over. The new owners will fire all the senior management (the ones who set the corporate culture of criminal neglection of safety), maybe even facilitate their criminal prosecution.
Once the blood lust of the public has been satisfied by the criminal prosecution of the BP management, the clean-up will be easier and cost less to do.
I think you could see hundreds of BP managers go to jail.
Posted by: daedalus2u | June 3, 2010 10:47 AM
Here's hoping you're right.
Posted by: DGKnipfer | June 3, 2010 12:03 PM
Whatever transpires, that is never going to happen. We'll be lucky if one executive or manager spends time behind bars.
Posted by: tacitus | June 3, 2010 12:10 PM
Instead of going to jail, they should all be out there cleaning up.
Posted by: MJL | June 3, 2010 12:56 PM
Is that indeed 97% of the industry's 'egregious, willful' complaints or 97% of all such complaints?
Posted by: AnonymousCoward | June 3, 2010 1:27 PM
So why not take inept BP off the job of stopping the leak and hire Sunoco or Conoco-Phillips or Citgo or even, yes, Exxon, to go in and do the job right? And bill BP for the cost!
And furthermore arrest the current BP management. Damn them.
Posted by: Reverend Rodney | June 3, 2010 1:43 PM
Well, if a corporation is a person in free-speech terms, a corporation should have to be so in criminal terms. Somebody should have to spend some hard time. It could become very interesting to see the finger-pointing, back-stabbing and whining in court.
Posted by: natural cynic | June 3, 2010 1:44 PM
...and, of course, they weren't allowed any more licences to drill oil in the US. What's that? They were? How come?
...and. of course, the tremendously risky deep sea drilling in the vulnerable Gulf of Mexico was only done to access vast tracts of oil that would supply the country for years. What's that? Only two days national consumption of oil? The entire field?
Shome mishtake, surely? Looks like some regulators need to lose their jobs, or join the BP execs in jail.
Posted by: davem | June 3, 2010 2:47 PM
daedalus2u - I hope you're being sarcastic.
The new owners wont hold the old owners accountable for the same reason that Obama won't prosecute the liars and law breakers of the previous administration. Or why the Vatican refuses to aid the prosecution of pedophiles from its own ranks.
It establishes a precedent of culpability. If the old guys can get tried, and/or imprisoned for their intentional violations of the law that means the new guys may be held to the same standard some day. Even if they have no criminal intentions they won't prosecute on the off chance that they may be held accountable for honest mistakes of judgment.
It is never in the best interest of the leaders of an organization to police themselves. It's like some old boy's club and doing so is considered bad form. The law can only successfully be enforced by an external organization. The problem with very powerful organizations, Governments, Conglomerates, Churches, is that there is no agency powerful enough to effectively hold them accountable. And if one existed, then Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Posted by: random guy | June 3, 2010 4:20 PM
Random guy, the owners of BP are the stockholders. If the current stockholders sell their stock, the new owners are free to do anything they want with BP as a company, including firing all of the managers. The stockholders should fire all of the managers because they did really screw up. They lost the stockholders $75 billion so far.
The stockholders probably want blood from the BP managers just as much as any environmentalist does, maybe even more. The BP managers lost the BP shareholders $75 billion. That is a lot of money. There is pressure on BP to not issue the next scheduled stock dividend of $10 billion. How are the stockholders going to like that?
BP paid $373 million in fines to avoid prosecution.
Why would the stockholders want BP to pay a penny in fines to avoid criminal prosecution of the managers that lost the stockholders $75 billion? I can think of 75 billion reasons why the shareholders would rather the managers went to jail.
Posted by: daedalus2u | June 3, 2010 6:35 PM
MJL wrote: "Instead of going to jail, they should all be out there cleaning up."
Yes. Without protective gear. Did not Tony Hayward venture the opinion that the complaints of the cleanup workers BP hired were probably due to food poisoning?
Posted by: Chris Winter | June 3, 2010 6:42 PM
I'm wondering if Iran would not be a friendly, secular nation if not for BP. They started as the anglo-iranian oil company, by which they secured drilling rights in Iran in 1908. The deal was, they'd keep 84% of the profits, and give 16% to the Iranian people. This was, of course, and incredibly raw deal, compounded by the fact that AIOC refused to open its books to Iran to prove they were getting their "fair" share. This led to a growing nationalization movement which came to a head in 1951, when Iran voted to nationalize it. Surprise, surprise, BP led a successful Iranian oil embargo, and two years later, along with the US, deposed the legitimate government and installed the Shah. AOIC became BP a year later. I think you all know what happened in 1979.
So my question is, had BP not been total dicks to Iran, would anyone in the US be talking about war with Iran? I think not.
Posted by: Robert Faber | June 3, 2010 6:48 PM
Now here's one thing I don't understand: It's obvious BP had no plan in place to stop a deep sea blow-out like the current disaster. Neither does the government possess any specialized expertise or technology for plugging this kind of leak. The question, with all this deep-water drilling going on, is why not?
The oil companies all pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, a kind of government-administered insurance program against oil spills. Now, most insurance companies don't just stuff their premiums into a mattress to pay out claims with later - it's common to also fund research and promote standards to reduce the risk in the first place. Sure enough, the OSLTF has as part of its mandate:
So knowing that drilling was taking place in deeper and deeper water, where was the research on deep-sea BOP design and disaster recovery?
Posted by: DaveL | June 3, 2010 7:04 PM
You might give a nod to Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle who scooped you on this by posting the disturbing news on May 18th.
Posted by: IanW | June 4, 2010 7:51 AM
well I for one am just totally pi$$ed (though not shocked really) that in light of these previous judgments and investigations, our government didn't put the kibosh on future drilling here! Add BP to the list of criminals sure, but don't forget to include the administration who let them get away with stuff for decades just to make money.
Posted by: Corrina Sysyn | June 4, 2010 10:39 PM
I was fired from BP for trying to get some serious safety issues rectified. While engaged in the effort they killed a man over the very issue I was attempting to have addressed. I made the mistake of thinking they were seriously interested in doing it right. They are a very arrogrant and self centered bunch of people.
Posted by: Rudy Burd | July 22, 2010 10:56 AM