BP sues over Macondo disaster

BP has issued a legal action against its drilling contractor Transocean over the Macondo well incident in the Gulf of Mexico. It is claiming damages of $40 billion (£24 billion) the estimated costs relating to the incident that killed 11 on the Deepwater Horizon rig and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The action came just before the one-year anniversary of the accident on 20 April, also the deadline in the US courts for filing claims in the case. Swiss-based Transocean has filed cross-claims against BP and other parties involved in the disaster.

BP has claimed that safety systems on Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon rig had failed. Transocean has rebuffed these claims and said that under its drilling contract for Deepwater Horizon, BP had full responsibility for any pollution or contamination. BP is also suing Houston-based Cameron International, which supplied the blow-out preventer that should have stopped oil gushing from the damaged well, and Halliburton, whose well-cementing work has also been identified as a primary cause of the accident. Cameron has, reportedly, filed counter-claims.

BP’s case seems strengthened by a new report from the US Coast Guard, which sharply criticised Transocean’s safety culture and training on the rig, and accused it of serious safety management failures prior to the accident.

A case for shared blame, meanwhile, appeared in the final report into the incident by the US National Oil Spill Commission. This linked the disaster to a series of “identifiable mistakes” made by BP, Halliburton and Transocean.

Failures by these companies “reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry”, the commission stated, in a damning final report.

Better management by BP and its partners Halliburton and Transocean, said the commission, would almost certainly have prevented the blow-out. The commission also noted: “Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blow-out clearly saved those companies significant time (and money).”