It Can’t Be Coincidence

There’s nothing like getting started early. Last year two days before the 40^th Earth Day celebration (4/20/2010) Oil Giant BP and its Deepwater Horizon team saw their nearly billion dollar investment in the oil rig explode in a truly spectacular way. Since then there has hardly been a day without bad news from this tragedy.

BP, however, has plowed doggedly ahead, demonstrating again and again a level of insensitivity usually seen in a rhinoceros and other thick-skinned earthlings. It didn’t seem that way in the beginning when they focused on winning the hearts and minds of the people impacted by this tragedy. They focused everything on their efforts to shut off the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Early on they downplayed the volume, as if that would divert attention from the fact that they hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to deal with a massive underwater gusher.

The world waited as they built one Rube Goldberg gadget after another, each sure to shut off or divert the flow. The three main players in this comedy of errors were all the while pointing at each other as the blame-game unfolded. While Deepwater Horizon was drilling for BP, it was owned and operated by an outfit called Transocean that does stuff like that.

After a few months of finger pointing and BP’s CEO and “Whiner in Chief,” Tony Hayward (“I want my life back”), wandering the Gulf beaches, the BP Board booted him. Of course in addition to getting his life back he got the millions in severance the standard reward failed business leaders expect these days.

In an effort to keep up with its annual Earth Day observance, this year (4/20/2011) BP took the blame-game up a notch and sued some of the other players in this tragedy: Transocean (of course), Halliburton (they seem to turn up everywhere) and Cameron International, the company that made the blowout gadget that was supposed to prevent this whole scenario.

The timing of BP’s lawsuits is just too perfect for words. Painting themselves as the “Victim” on the first anniversary of this continuing disaster shows them as the kind of heartless villains that give business a bad name. The minority that besmear the reputations of the great majority of businesses striving for high ethical standards.

All through this horror story BP and their fellow members of the Keystone Kops School of Management have scrambled to keep the focus on anything but the one factor that should be in the fore, especially on the first anniversary of the disaster. The amount of oil leaking, the environmental impact, the impact on the businesses and the beaches, are all important but secondary.

The loss of eleven lives, injuries to another seventeen, that’s what we should be focusing on. That’s the real tragedy.  Those families will never get their lives back. To cynically make a move designed to clog the news cycle on the first anniversary of the spill when the focus should have been on those who lost their loved ones is beyond disgusting, it’s just evil.