by Jed Lewison
After telling David Gregory that he thought Tony Hayward is "doing a fantastic job," BP Managing Director Bo Dudley comes up with a novel argument for saving Hayward's skin: that nobody thought the blowout preventer could fail. CROWLEY: Do you think after this is all over that there are BP executives that ought to resign over the fact that there didn't seem to be any contingency plans for this sort of thing? DUDLEY: Well, Candy, this is an unprecedented accident in the oil and gas industry. ... The failure of the blowout preventers, which is the ultimate multiple redundant fail-safe system, has not happened like this before ... everyone in the industry now has to step back, look at this piece of equipment that generally the industry regarded as fail-safe, go back, figure out what happens, understand it, disseminate that, make sure it doesn't happen anywhere, anytime -- anywhere in the world again. Let's look at this in a couple of different ways. First, assume that Dudley is correct and nobody thought the blowout preventer could fail. Isn't that incredibly damning? He's basically saying that everybody failed to anticipate the possibility of a massive blowout like the one gushing into the Gulf. If that's really true, that's a really, really big screw up. It's so big that not only should Hayward be fired, but the entire drilling industry should pack up their bags, because if they can't see the risk in a blowout preventer failing, they've got no business working in dangerous waters. Second, assume that Dudley is wrong, and that there were people who anticipated the possibility of a blowout preventer failure. (This scenario seems infinitely more plausible, at least to me.) If that is the case, what possible argument is there against firing Hayward? We know BP was cutting corners. If BP (as seems overwhelmingly likely) also knew that cutting corners increased the risk of blowout preventer failure, getting fired should be the least of Hayward's concerns. Either way, it's just amazing that after a screw up of this magnitude, Tony Hayward isn't looking for a job. The fact that he's still in the driver's seat tells you a lot about the character of the people at BP. And it sheds light on how this occurred in the first place.
continued at Daily Kos....
