Friday, July 16, 2010
The nation’s worst oil spill disaster involved a company that cut corners to boost profits, failsafe systems that just failed, backup plans that never existed and federal regulators who were too close to industry. A summation of the current Gulf of Mexico accident?
Try the Exxon Valdez mess of March 1989.
Many characteristics of the present crisis took place more than 20 years ago off the coast of Alaska, demonstrating how little the private and public sectors learned from what was the worst petroleum spill in U.S. history until the Deepwater Horizon debacle came along.
“It’s disappointing,” Walt Parker, chairman of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission that offered numerous recommendations for preventing a recurrence of the 1989 accident, told The Washington Post. “It’s almost as though we had never written the report.”
A commonality between the Alaska and Gulf of Mexico disasters is BP, or British Petroleum as it was known two decades ago. The flawed emergency response plan in 1989 was the responsibility of Alyeska Pipeline Service, a consortium operating the Trans Alaska Pipeline System whose controlling partner was BP.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Lessons from Exxon Valdez Spill Have Gone Unheeded (by Joe Stephens, Washington Post)
BP Had a Key Role in the Exxon Valdez Disaster (by Noaki Schwartz, Associated Press)
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