Bad management led to Gulf oil disaster, says US report

Better management could have prevented the Gulf of Mexico oil well disaster in which 11 people died last April, according to a US government report.

The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling concluded that the well blew out “because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent just such an event

from happening”.

It said that most of the mistakes and oversights at the Macondo oil well could be traced back “to a single overarching failure — a failure of management”.

The report claimed that better management by three companies involved with the well - BP, Halliburton, and Transocean - would almost certainly have prevented the blow-out by “improving the ability of individuals involved to identify the risks they faced, and to properly evaluate, communicate, and address them”.

“A blowout in deep water was not a statistical inevitability,” said the report.