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Fred Bartlit, chief counsel of the National Oil Spill Commission, holds a model of the BP well bore hole on Monday as he presents preliminary findings on the blowout and resulting spill at a public hearing in Washington, D.C.
msnbc.com staff and news service reports msnbc.com staff and news service reports
WASHINGTON — No evidence was found that a conscious decision was made to sacrifice safety in order to save money, the presidential Gulf oil spill panel said in preliminary findings released Monday, but BP incurred "additional risk" and teams of workers — both BP and contractors — made poor judgments ahead of the April 20 well blowout and rig explosion.
Issued as 13 bullet points, the findings focus on the cement work done to seal the well once it was drilled, the tests done to check on the cement, the choices made by BP on how to plug the well until it was to be started up later, and how crew reacted in the last few hours before the blowout.Panel staff were elaborating on the findings during presentations Monday to start a two-day hearing that will include reaction from BP and its main contractors, Halliburton, which did the cement job, and Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Fred Bartlit, Jr., the panel's chief investigator, said in his presentation to the seven-member oil spill commission that he agreed with about 90 percent of BP's findings, although the company left out some critical details and there were other areas where the panel's probe will conflict. A final report is due by Jan. 11.
The "additional risk" cited by Bartlit and his staff included the timing of BP decisions to remove heavy mud and plugs that provided barriers against any blowout.
Bartlit also challenged a narrative that has dominated the headlines and Democratic probes in Congress since the April 20 incident killed 11 and unleashed more than 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico: that BP made perilous choices to save money.
"We see no instance where a decision-making person or group of people sat there aware of safety risks, aware of costs and opted to give up safety for costs," Bartlit said. "We do not say everything done was perfectly safe. ... We studied the hell out of this. We welcome anybody who gives us something we missed."
Daniel Becnel, a Louisiana lawyer suing BP and others over the oil spill, called the commission's findings about money not jeopardizing safety "absolutely absurd." He also took issue with Bartlit's endorsement of BP's view of events.
"They are pasting over because they know the government is going to be a defendant sooner or later in this litigation," Becnel said.
According to testimony before the government's joint investigative panel, the Macondo well project was nearly $60 million over budget days before the explosion. That panel has been paying particular attention to the issue of whether money was put ahead of safety.
BP's internal investigation found flaws with contractor Halliburton's cement job and the maintenance performed by rig owner Transocean on critical pieces of equipment. The company also questioned how its own employees misread a critical pressure test before the blowout.
Story: Dead, dying coral found near BP spill called 'smoking gun' Democrats in Congress have focused on BP's well design, saying the company made decisions that sacrificed safety to save millions of dollars. Those choices included running a single piece of pipe from the seafloor to the bottom of the well, something called a "long string." BP also chose to use fewer centralizers, devices that hold the pipe down the center of the well for cementing.
In a June letter to then-BP CEO Tony Hayward, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bart Stupak, D-Mich., questioned at least five decisions BP made in the days leading up to the explosion.
"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," said Waxman and Stupak.
"Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense," the lawmakers wrote.
In a statement to The Associated Press on Monday, Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a member of Waxman's energy panel that is investigating the spill, stood by those claims.
"When the culture of a company favors risk-taking and cutting corners above other concerns, systemic failures like this oil spill disaster result without direct decisions being made or tradeoffs being considered," Markey said. "What is fully evident, from BP's pipeline spill in Alaska and the Texas city refinery disaster, to the Deepwater Horizon well failure, is that BP has a long and sordid history of cutting costs and pushing the limits in search of higher profits."
After months of hearings, investigations and finger-pointing, there is still disagreement over what and whose mistakes triggered the deadly and polluting explosion.
The president's commission is the first independent body to weigh in. Like BP, it found that the oil and gas traveled up the center of the pipe in the well, rather than up the sides. They also questioned, like BP, the interpretation of a critical test used to determine if the well was stable before the company abandoned it. The investigators said that some procedures BP decided to use in that process, where a well is plugged until a company is ready to harvest oil and gas, introduced additional risk.
But its probe also left out critical elements, including why the blowout preventer — the last defense against a runaway well — failed to block the flow of oil and gas. Bartlit said the team would await a forensic analysis before drawing conclusions. The blowout preventer is now protected evidence in a federal court case into the disaster.
Bartlit said his job was not to assign blame, but to deliver a report about what happened aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig.
He started his presentation with a moment of silence for the blowout's victims.
"We will honor them if we can get to a root cause without a lot of bickering and self-serving statements," Bartlit said.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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