The rewards of performance

Remember the folks who brought you the BP oil platform explosion and the oil leak into the Gulf? What did they suffer from such lax, and expensive, incompetency?

Bonuses all around.

From CNN:

Declaring 2010 "the best year in safety performance in our company's history," Transocean Ltd., owner of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded, killing 11 workers, has awarded its top executives hefty bonuses and raises, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Meanwhile I win a big teaching award and an effective pay cut along with it.

makes you wonder what they were doing in all those other years.

BP and the big mess

Frank Rich in the NYT takes Obama to task for trusting "experts" - i.e. missing the point of the Double Aughts: all elites and institutions failed. Here is his rundown of the record of British Petroleum:

This is baffling, and then some, given BP’s atrocious record prior to this catastrophe. In the last three years, according to the Center for Public Integrity, BP accounted for “97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors” — including 760 citations for “egregious, willful” violations (compared with only eight at the two oil companies that tied for second place). Hayward’s predecessor at BP, ousted in a sex-and-blackmail scandal in 2007, had placed cost-cutting (and ever more obscene profits) over safety, culminating in the BP Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005. Last October The Times uncovered documents revealing that BP had still failed to address hundreds of safety hazards at that refinery in the four years after the explosion, prompting the largest fine in the history of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The fine, $87 million, was no doubt regarded as petty cash by a company whose profit reached nearly $17 billion last year.)

I'd tell you what I think about BP but then I would be unAmerican, at least according to one well known Republican.

who the hell names their child after Ayn Rand?

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Coming to a beach near you soon

If you are on the east coast, or the Gulf coast, you may be making plans for a fun filled week at the beach this summer.

Don't.

Blast from the past

And I mean 'blast' quite literally. I was rereading some old posts looking for something and stumbled across this post from January 2007 entitled "What you pay for when you pay for gas":

Well, it's certainly not even a minimal amount of safety, neither for the giant BP gas company's own employees nor the environment. Here's the results of a damning report on BP's systematic shortchanging safety at its refineries - one of which blew up killing 15 people. And then there is the Alaska pipeline that BP allowed to deteriorate to the point it burst.

The Texas City plant was not the only refinery in need of greater company spending. The panel said that many hourly workers interviewed at BP's Whiting, Ind., refinery reported that as a result of underfunding, "preventive maintenance was seldom practiced, the refinery had a 'run until it breaks' mentality, and the workforce had a great deal of experience running equipment with 'Band-Aids.' " A survey of people working at a Toledo refinery showed that 33 percent of operations managers, 44 percent of maintenance technicians and 63 percent of health-and-safety employees disagreed with the statement that "process safety programs . . . have adequate funding."

After a consultant hired by BP urged bigger refinery budgets, BP increased spending somewhat. But in late 2004, weeks before the explosion, BP headquarters had asked its refineries to trim costs by an additional 25 percent. "It is not clear to the Panel why the U.S. refineries did not receive greater funding," the Baker report says.

Remember the billions in windfall profits BP and other companies raked in when your gas prices went up to $3 a gal? The price spike that ended, oh, just before the last election?

Well, the Good Book is right: there IS nothing new under the sun.

Enjoy your next fill up.

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