WASHINGTON — BP acted to cut costs in the weeks before the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico as it dealt with one problem after another on the doomed rig. The activity prompted a BP engineer to describe the Deepwater Horizon as a “nightmare well,” according to internal documents released Monday.
The comment by BP engineer Brian Morel came in an email April 14, six days before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 people and has sent tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf in the nation’s worst environmental disaster.
The email was among dozens of internal documents released by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating the explosion and its aftermath.
In a letter to BP CEO Tony Hayward, Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak noted at least five questionable 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. Waxman chairs the energy panel, while Stupak heads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
“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 the 14-page letter to Hayward. “If this is what happened, BP’s carelessness and complacency have inflicted a heavy toll on the Gulf, its inhabitants, and the workers on the rig.”
The letter, supplemented by 61 footnotes and dozens of documents, outlines a series of questions Hayward can expect when he comes before Stupak’s subcommittee on Thursday.
The hearing will be Hayward’s first appearance before a congressional committee since the explosion and sinking of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon rig. BP America President Lamar McKay and other officials represented the company at earlier hearings.
Despite warnings from its own engineers, “BP chose the more risky casing option, apparently because the liner option would have cost $7 to $10 million more and taken longer,” Waxman and Stupak said.
That turned out to be a mistake, according to experts.