Question

BP had a group-wide corporate system to evaluate risk, introduced by Hayward. Why did this not predict the Deepwater Horizon Disaster?

Answer 1

Answer: High Complexity of the Drilling operation

Explanation:

The Deepwater Horizon disaster was the largest oil spillage in the history of maritime oil disasters and happened in April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on a BP oil project.

Normally, Oil Companies have plans that are meant to evaluate the risk of such events such that they can be avoided and indeed BP did have one which was introduced by its CEO Tony Hayward but this failed to predict the Deep Water Horizon for the simple reason that the project was too complex for it.

With so many things involved in the project, the system was not adequately prepared to handle the risk of failure from such complex structures such as the Deepwater Horizon rig which meant that BP were simply not prepared for the spill when it happened and this led to allegations that BP was not a safety-conscious company.

The corporate system that was used to evaluate risk at BP was not able to predict the Deepwater Horizon disaster for the primary reason that the system was rendered useless in the face of high degree of complexity that BP’s oil drilling operations in Gulf of Mexico faced. Due to the high degree of risk all the participating parties lost hold of sight over the risk analysis process that was put in place by the company.

The complexity of the system led to the undermining and failure of the corporate system to evaluate risk. BP tried to shift the weight of the blame to Transocean Company, but in fact it was BP itself that failed to foresee this event.