When profits come before safety

If you are a fan of action movies and disaster movies, there is a very good reason to check out this film. More importantly if you are a safety person this is a film to see – however painful it may be. It is based on fact and shows in traumatic detail the consequences of cutting corners on safety, including killing 11 workers.

Based on the true events that occurred on a US oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, it tells the story of those who worked on the Deepwater Horizon and the extreme moments of bravery and survival in the face of what would become one of the biggest man-made disasters in world history.

On the night of April 20, 2010, a series of explosions ripped through the Deepwater Horizon rig 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, following the blowout of an oil well thousands of feet below.

The disaster killed 11 workers, sent 4.9m barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, went down in history as America’s largest environmental disaster and cost BP $62bn dollars.

The film comes recommended by the United Steelworkers Union (USW) who staged a pre-release screening at their recent health and safety conference in Pittsburgh.

The appalling irony is that the rig had an apparently fantastic traditional safety record, with BP executives on board to present a safety award on the day the rig blew up. So much for safety records!

Safety sacrifices

The film spells out the shortcuts and safety sacrifices that were made by BP and Transocean leading to the disaster.

As eminent professor Professor Sidney Dekker has said in his book, The field guide to understanding human error has said about many organisations which have suffered calamities, “Before they blew stuff up and killed scores of their employees, their numbers of minor negative events were really low (or even zero for some time). … They were evidently counting what could be counted, not what counted.”

According to the Guardian, the film “… squarely, and quite rightly, places the blame for the disaster at BP’s door. Without turning them into moustache-twirling villains, we see its representatives callously place profits over potential loss of human life and environmental damage.”

Another reviewer, Scott Chilwood says, “The real message was the consequence of cutting corners. When people sacrifice technical expertise and careful thought for the sake of money and time, the consequences can be disastrous. And that’s not just a lesson for the oil industry. It’s a lesson for every engineering discipline.”

While this film might be enjoyable for the action buffs, always remember 11 workers were killed and many more injured, and the first thing that happened when the survivors got to shore was that they were drug tested, as if anything of what happened could be blamed on them.

In the US courts, a federal judge found in a civil case that BP, which leased the rig and was in charge of the operation, was grossly negligent. In apportioning two-thirds of the blame to the company, the judge stated that they had acted “recklessly.” (The judge assigned Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon, 30 per cent of the blame, and Halliburton, a contractor that oversaw an important step in closing up the well, three per cent.) BP is still appealing the gross negligence finding.

I believe this film shows the harrowing consequences of putting profits before safety. While it portrays the offshore oil industry, the same thing can be found in many organisations throughout the UK. It proves the worth of trade union safety reps who push for good health and safety every day.