Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

In the text, Kreitner and Kinicki (2013) states that decision making is one of the primary responsibilities of a manager, and the quality of one’s decisions can have serious consequences. As the title of this cause study shows Faulty Decision Making is the Cause of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Faulty decision making or lack of any decision making is the key to this disaster.

the chief executives of BP chose to call the accident and oversight “a fallacious, if not outright

The key takeaways from this case are the importance of having a decision making process in place, as well as not relying on bias to fix a situation. There should have been policies and procedures in place so that when disaster strikes there are guidelines to follow. The model for rational decision making could have been followed. The problem should have been identified, general alternative solutions should have been discussed, evaluate alternatives and select a solutions, and then finally implement and evaluate the solution that was chosen. Had BP and Transocean had effective communication the oil rig may not have caused such a disaster (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013).

The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill occurred on April 20, 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. This oil spill was the largest spill in history in front of the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. This oil spill released about 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean. This spill not only wreck havoc on the marine life but also the economic players that depended on ocean such as fisherman, tourism, and offshore drilling located along the gulf coast. Along will the spill the oil rig which was named Deepwater Horizon also went up in flames. This proved that the issue went far beyond just an oil rig that blew a line. Since this oil spill had drastic impacts all along the coast, BP which was the most liable for this incident faced criminal charges based on what happened. BP which knew the risks of deep ocean drilling failed to take the necessary safety procedures to reduce the risks of such incident occurring, thus was the reasoning behind placing most of the fault on them and not the other companies. The lack of regulatory oversight led to the issues and cost-cutting procedures opened the rig up to possible malfunctions like the one that occurred. During the spill into the gulf, BP sealed the well with cement which seemed to stop a majority of the oil from escaping the well. BP also recognized that the well was “dead” which was proven wrong when scientists still could conclude was leaking minor amounts of oil into the ocean. This spill not only proved to be harmful to the environment but also

traced to a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean” and “The decisions

MEJRI, Mohamed, and Daniel DE WOLF. 2013. "Crisis Management: Lessons Learnt From The BP Deepwater Horizon Spill Oil". Business Management And Strategy 4 (2): 67. doi:10.5296/bms.v4i2.4950.

The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the largest offshore oil spills in U.S. history, BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010. This paper seeks to investigate closely the system and the reasons of failure, to answer the questions behind numerous studies on this accident, Is Deepwater Horizon explosion inevitable? and What can we do to avoid such accidents?

Conduct of the people within both NASA and Morton Thiokol with respect to the risk management was unplanned. NASA management had to make a choice at the last minute even when everyone agreed that a disastrous possibility existed. It was understood that the duties of the engineers and managers were clearly defined. Much of the evidence relating to the tragedy was dismissed. Conduct of the entire project team could be interpreted as group

USDC (2012) reports that on April 20, 2010 examinations of the world concentrated on an oil platform in the Gulf, around 50 miles off the Louisiana coastline. The mobile drilling unit Deepwater Horizon, which was being made used to drill an experimental well for BP Exploration and Production, Inc. (BP), violently blew up, ignited and at some point sank, tragically eliminating 11 employees. However that was just the start of the catastrophe. Oil and various other compounds from the rig and the well started streaming unabated around one mile below the area. Preliminary efforts to cap the wells were not successful, and for 87 days oil ejected unmonitored and uncontrolled into the Gulf. Oil soon enough covered a huge location of hundreds of square miles, and held by the tides and currents reached the coastline, contaminating beaches, bays, estuaries and marshes from the Florida panhandle to west of the Mississippi River delta. At the height of the spill, around 37 % of the open water in the Gulf was closed to fishing.

The BP oil spill was one of the worst oil spills to ever happen in the US. There are many factors that caused this horrible spill to happen; to be exact there were eight failures of the oilrig that caused this disaster. The first failure was the cement at the bottom of the borehole was not sealed properly. This caused the oil and gas to start leaking into the pipe leading to the surface of the rig. The second failure was that the valve leading to the surface was sealed improperly with cement. In addition, there were two mechanical valves, which failed to stop the leak of gas and oil. The crew was also to blame because they did pressure tests, which they did not read properly. This made the crew believe the oil well was under control when it was not. The crew also did not spot the leak before the explosion; there was an increase in pressure inside the well fifty minutes before the explosion but the crew did not interpret it as a leak. Next, about eight minutes before the rig exploded, mud and gas began to come out onto the floor of the rig. The crew tried to stop this by activating the blowout preventer, which is at the top of the well, however this caused the blowout preventer to malfunction. The rig had side vents that were suppose to release this mud and gas, but instead it was diverted to a device that separates only small amounts of mud and gas. This device quickly became overwhelmed and flammable gas was sent all over the rig. The alarm on the rig should have sounded

The job of a risk manager is to hope for the best, be prepared but for the worst. That means putting emergency response systems in place to cope with a worst-case scenario. The situation remains out of control and the damage substantial— environmental, economic and political. Did BP shy away from expensive loss control measures because a worst-case scenario was so unlikely?

The e Deepwater Horizon oil spill at the Macondo well began on April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on 20 April 2010 killed 11 people and caused almost 5 million barrels of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill covered 68,000 square miles of land and sea and triggered a response effort involving the use of nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant chemicals (Pallardy). Considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) resulted in widespread environmental and economic damage, the exact nature of which is only beginning to be understood (Shultz 59). This paper will address the causes of this unmitigated ecological disaster and discuss steps that need to be taken to prevent a similar disaster from occurring again.

Part 1 - Ethical Dilemmas- The accident elicited many feelings anger, disillusionment, disgust, and even employees feeling like they were let down because BP had not backed up its values promised to

More specifically, they were trying to avoid the blame and further their individual motives. When I saw the film I thought to myself there’s no possible way this happens in real life, but the article shows two examples. The Challenger case as well as the Macondo Well blowout showed that even though engineers might have noticed a problem, in the end management or other engineers decided that it was safe enough to proceed. Then during the investigation, the leaders of the company or project managers decided to play innocent and ignorant. The other thing that I found interesting is the “practice defines facts” model. If correlations are found, then they become facts until they are disproven; this is the problem with the model. A fact should not be able to change, if a fact is truly a fact then the evidence should always support it. When we spread misinformation by stating a correlation is fact, it can lead to many people thinking that it is the truth. It goes back to the first articles we read in class about misleading information in science. Not only does the Macondo/Challenger article tie into the film that we watch it also ties into other topics that we learned about ethics. People in certain situations have an innate self-interest that hurts

Although the accident was caused by a mechanical failure, it spiralled out of control because of an insufficient safety system. BP acted inefficiently and their carelessness cost the lives of people and damaged the environment, nevertheless this does not mean they acted in an unethical way as