The first signs that not all was well came in March, when 200,000 barrels of oil spilled onto the Prudhoe Bay tundra from a leaking pipeline. It appeared to be an isolated incident, but it set off a chain of events that led to the realisation that miles of pipes were dangerously corroded. In August, almost half the field had to be shut down.

BP faces a criminal investigation as well as inquiries by regulators and Congressional investigations into its maintenance record, amid allegations that the company neglected its infrastructure for years to boost profits.

In many aspects, what has happened in Alaska merely mirrored what was going on thousands of miles to the south in Texas City, where a refinery explosion killed 15 people and injured scores of others in 2005.

BP settled lawsuits with the families of those killed, but not before a report from the Chemical Safety Board catalogued years of unheeded warnings about the potential for disaster at the site. The regulator claimed that management was sub-standard, unsafe and antiquated equipment was not replaced and maintenance was deficient.

A website set up by lawyers for one of those whose parents were killed in the blast is publishing ever more damaging documents that show that Lord Browne himself knew of the poor safety record at the refinery, where workers feared for their lives every day and where even its managers admitted equipment was patched together with "band aids and super glue".

But if those are the two incidents that have generated the most headlines, they merely head an ever growing list of problems filling Lord Browne's in-tray.

The company was forced to admit that production at its Thunderhorse platform in the Gulf of Mexico would have to be delayed again after more problems were discovered.

BP's trading operations face criminal and civil investigations into whether the company has purposely manipulated the crude oil, petrol and propane markets.

Just yesterday the company found itself on the wrong end of a Supreme Court ruling over royalty rates that could see it forced to pay millions of dollars, on top of $30m of back taxes.

That pales into insignificance compared with the $1.4bn tax bill BP's Russian joint venture was forced to pay the Kremlin this month. The Russian government, in a bid to exert its control over its energy resources, is also threatening to withdraw some of BP-TNK's licences, ostensibly on environmental grounds.
http://spewingforth.blogspot.com/2006/12/bp-texas-city-more-evidence-that.html


British Petroleum (PLC) and John Browne: A Culture of Risk Beyond Petroleum
by Murray J. Bryant, Trevor Hunter
13 pages.  Publication date: Apr 23, 2008. Prod. #: 908M02-PDF-ENG
The year 2007 had to have been one of the worst in the history of British Petroleum plc (BP). In the span of four months, two separate independent reports (the first one commissioned by BP itself) had identified a deeply rooted "culture of risk" within BP where money and profits were valued above worker and environmental safety. These reports were in response to an explosion in 2005 at an oil refinery in Texas City, in the United States, which killed 15 people and injured more than 180, but the reports also referred to pipeline leaks in Alaska as well as other serious safety lapses throughout BP's global operations. The Texas City explosion was the worst but not the first major incident at a BP facility, and the revelations in the reports severely damaged the credibility the so-called super-major oil company had earned over the last decade. The job of restoring investor and stakeholder confidence as well as the firm's reputation fell to the BP board and its star group chief executive, Lord John Browne. The B case, product 908M03, examines the role played by the board with respect to the personal integrity of Lord Browne. The teaching objectives are to introduce students to examining the role of the board with respect to risk management as well as its social responsibilities to various stakeholders.
http://hbr.org/product/british-petroleum-plc-and-john-browne-a-culture-of/an/908M02-PDF-ENG

Friday, December 01, 2006PERMALINK Posted 12:12 AM by Jordan

BP: More Workplace Safety Problems



BP continues to have serious workplace safety problems. The giant petroleum company that killed 15 workers and injured 180 in an explosion at its Texas City refinery in 2005 has just confirmed two recent contractor fatalities.

Posted: Saturday, 02 August 2008 12:52AM
A Decade Later, Former (BP) Amoco Employees Continue To Die From Brain Cancer
NAPERVILLE — Ten years after lawsuits began pouring in against oil-giant BP Amoco regarding more than 20 employees of their Naperville research center developing a variety of deadly cancers, lawyers for the families of the victims think they are getting closer to a trial.
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Employees of the center performed a number of scientific experiments using chemicals that are “known neurotoxins or carcinogens,” the suit alleged. Building 500, which has three wings connected to the research center, “consistently had problems in the air quality which caused employees to complain as early as the 1970s,” the suit said.
Paul Koning’s form of brain cancer was the most widespread type among employees in Building 500, according to Mrs. Koning’s lawyer Kenneth Lumb. Lumb’s firm, Corboy and Demetrio, has been representing cases regarding regarding Building 500 employees like Koning for ten years.
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“It became abundantly clear that there was an excess of tumors found in employees at the facility in the mid-90s,” Lumb said.
The company was allegedly aware of the problem with ventilation and toxins in the 1970s, but failed to alert employees until the lawsuits began coming in 1998.
The company then hired researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Johns Hopkins University, who conducted what Lumb calls a “shallow and limited study” which only slightly acknowledged “part of the problem.”
That study found that the amount of gliomas, or brain cancer, recorded among white men who worked in the complex’s Building 503 was 15 times that of the general population, but did not address any other forms of cancer. BP Amoco has maintained that, aside from brain cancer, there was not significant rise in other cancers.
“We heartily disagree with that,” Lumb said. Former Building 500 employees have died of cancers in the liver, colon, bladder and a variety of brain cancers over the years.
At least seven former employees of the research center have died from a variety of cancers allegedly caused by toxins they were exposed to while working at the facility.
The third floor of a wing in Building 500 was closed down in 1996, about 20 years after original complaints were made, the suit said. The highest number of employees with cancerous tumors worked on that floor, Lumb said.
Lumb says his firm has been sorting through more than 600,000 pages of documents, many of which took ten years to obtain from the oil giant. After years of what he calls a “procedural battle,” Lumb thinks cases will start being tried as soon as next year.
BP Amoco settled suits with several families whose loved one’s died of cancer in 2000, but settlements have slowed, Lumb said….