Barack Obama's rig blast inquiry clears BP of claims it put profit before safety

A UNITED States presidential commission said yesterday that there was nothing to suggest BP had compromised safety to save money while drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. But it said the com-pany had been guilty of mismanagement.

Contradicting claims by members of the US Congress that finance played a role in the world's largest accidental oil spill, the lead officer on an investigative panel set up by President Barack Obama told a hearing that his inquiries had yielded no such evidence.

"We have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favour dollars over safety," said Fred Bartlit, chief counsel for the National Oil Spill Commission.

"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.

"We do not say everything was done perfectly safe - we welcome anybody who gives us something we missed."

But the commission also heard that BP and Transocean workers took fatally flawed decisions in the days before the disaster.

Sean Grimsley, lead counsel for the commission, said there was clear evidence that BP "introduced risk that may not have been necessary" when its officials decided to remove heavy drilling mud that was acting as a barrier against explosive gases surging up the well.

Mr Bartlit declared himself in agreement with 90 per cent of BP's own investigation into the disaster. That report, published two months ago, blamed Trans-ocean, which owned the rig, and Halliburton, which cemented the well, for deficiencies, but also admitted mistakes by BP's own engineers, including that they misread crucial data and took flawed decisions relating to the handling of dangerous sub-sea pressures.

The resulting explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on 20 April killed 11 men and opened up a leak that sent 4.9 million barrels of crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, according to calculations by the US government's Flow Rate Technical Group, before it was capped 87 days later.

Oil continues to blight Louisiana's marshes. A report published this week by scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has also highlighted a massive dying-off of coral seven miles from the site of the spill.

The public hearing yesterday was the first by the commission, which expects to publish its final report in January.

Other panels holding inquiries into the disaster, of which there are at least ten, have also heard claims of cost trumping safety considerations, including a congressional panel that heard how the oil well project was nearly $60m (38m) over budget at the time of the accident.It blamed BP's well design as a contributory factor and pinpointed five decisions by the company in the days leading up to the disaster as flawed.

"The common feature of these five decisions is that they posed a trade-off between cost and well safety," stated a letter sent in June to BP's then chief executive, Tony Hayward, by Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak.

But the commission's chairman, Bob Graham, said that as the first "independent body" to examine the Deepwater Horizon incident, the presidential commission would submit the "clearest presentation the American people have received to date about what led to this tragedy."