Tar and Feathers

"60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley met: Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno.

He says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps.

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The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long. Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before.

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He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged.

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Down near the seabed is the blowout preventer, or BOP. It's used to seal the well shut in order to test the pressure and integrity of the well, and, in case of a blowout, it's the crew's only hope. A key component is a rubber gasket at the top called an "annular," which can close tightly around the drill pipe.

Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising to the top made a troubling find.

"He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out of the ordinary. And he says, 'Oh, it's no big deal.' And I thought, 'How can it be not a big deal? There's chunks of our seal is now missing,'" Williams told Pelley.

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The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

  CBS

Read the rest, including Mike Williams’ harrowing experiences in the explosion. Or watch the video at the same CBS link.(Interview video at NOLA.com)

And it's not the first time BP has been guilty of very bad practices. But, as we've seen, BP has its tentacles in Washington's regulatory agencies, and even in the White House.

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.

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 .

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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.

After a 2005 BP refinery explosion in Texas City, Texas that killed 15 people and injured 180, a Justice Department investigation found that the explosion was caused by "improperly released vapor and liquid." Several procedures required by the Clean Air Act to reduce the possibility of just such an explosion either were not followed, or had not been established in the first place.

BP admitted that its written procedures to ensure its equipment's safety were inadequate, and that it had failed to inform employees of known fire and explosion risks. The company paid $50 million in criminal fines in connection with that disaster, and acknowledged violating the Clean Air Act.

  ABC

Obviously, that was not nearly enough.

BP never fixed the problems in Texas City. Just last October, OSHA fined the company $87 million because it has failed to correct the safety problems at the rebuilt Texas City plant.

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In 2007, a BP pipeline spill poured 200,000 gallons of crude oil into the pristine Alaskan wilderness. In researching the environmental hazard, investigators discovered BP was aware of corrosion along the pipeline where the leak occurred but did not respond appropriately. The company was forced to pay $12 million more in criminal fines for the spill, in addition to another $4 million to the state of Alaska.

Again…not nearly enough it seems.

But for a company that reported profits of $14 billion in 2009, the fines represent a small fraction of the cost of doing business.

BP paid [CEO Tony] Hayward $6 million last year — a 41 percent raise over the year before, even though the company's profits fell 45 percent.

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BP somehow pulled off a cynical greenwashing ad campaign, marketing itself as environmentally friendly and declaring itself "beyond petroleum."

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Eleven oil workers were killed in the explosion that sank BP's rig; the Gulf of Mexico may be permanently ruined; thousands of fishers and shrimpers have lost their livelihood; birds, fish and turtles are dying by the score; some people are starting to wonder if nuking the Deepwater Horizon might be the best way to stop it.

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"There's no one who wants this over more than I do,"[Hayward] told the "Today Show" on Sunday. "You know, I'd like my life back."

  Salon

More tar and feathers, please.