BP Supervisor Fired for Expressing Safety Concerns

[Stuart G]

Source: Huffington Post

Lucia Graves..first posted 4:45pm Eastern, 6/17/10

Ken Abbott, a former project control supervisor on BP's Atlantis deepwater oil rig, was fired in 2009 after expressing concerns about the safety of the operation.

"I got a lot of pressure from the lead engineers and from the managers saying, 'Don't do that; don't push so much; we don't want to mess with that,'" Abbott told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday. "I feel like the real reason I was fired was because I was trying to raise a safety issue, and you know BP has a long history of getting rid of people who try to raise safety issues. I was one of those victims."

"Management sets the tone," Abbott added. "If they think that production is more important than safety, then that's the tone of the company, and that was the tone at Atlantis."

In his testimony on the Hill on Thursday, BP CEO Tony Hayward repeatedly said that he didn't make any design choices. "I wasn't involved in any of the decision-making," he told Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), adding that there were clearly discussions about rig safety among the well's engineering team.
"You're not taking responsibility," Waxman said. "You're kicking the can down the road and acting like you have nothing to do with... this company. I find that irresponsible."

Congressional investigators recently obtained internal BP documents showing that BP chose a well design for Deepwater Horizon that was riskier but $3 million cheaper.


Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/bp-supervisor-...

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