ALL'S WELL? BP's "powerful" new safety unit is seeking to make life more comfortable for its shareholders.

The creation by BP of a new global safety unit with “sweeping powers” has the safety of shareholders’ money as its “ultimate goal”, the company’s top boss has admitted.

In a 1 October news release from the oil giant’s London HQ announcing the “powerful new organisation”, BP chair Carl-Henric Svanberg said there were “difficult challenges ahead” but added “we have assembled a strong and able new team and are developing a robust strategy to deal with them and to deliver our ultimate goal – the restoration of shareholder value.”

Mark Bly, who headed BP’s internal investigation into the hugely damaging US Deepwater Horizon oil spill, will run the new unit. His report has been criticised for overlooking the role of BP’s top management, including its London-based board, in decisions contributing to the disaster, which killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental catastrophe. In evidence last month to a US Department of the Interior-commissioned National Academy of Engineering hearing, Bly admitted his internal BP team has only looked at the immediate cause of the 20 April disaster, conceding the study “does not represent a complete penetration into potentially deeper issues.”

Commenting on the formation of Bly’s new global safety unit, Bob Dudley, who took over from Tony Hayward as BP chief executive on 1 October, said it will have authority to intervene in all aspects of BP’s technical activities. He added that the company will also conduct “a fundamental review” of its business performance incentives, including its “reward strategy”.

Dudley said: “These are the first and most urgent steps in a programme I am putting in place to rebuild trust in BP – the trust of our customers, of governments, of our employees and of the world at large. That trust is vital to the restoration of shareholder value which has been so adversely affected by recent events. The changes are in areas where I believe we most clearly need to act, with safety and risk management our most urgent priority.”

BP was fined a $15 million last month for pollution offences related to fires at its troubled Texas City refinery, which released highly toxic plumes including carcinogenic benzene into the air. Fifteen workers died in an explosion at the plant in 2005.

CLEANING UP? BP's well remunerated directors may emerge from the Deepwater Horizon disaster with a squeaky clean record, despite the 11 deaths in the Gulf coming just five years after it killed 15 at its Texas City refinery.

The share price of UK oil multinational BP soared this week after the company indicated the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico had been “killed”. The company has spent five months attempting to seal its Macondo well, after a 20 April explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and triggered an environmental catastrophe.

The share price surge came as more optimistic analysts predicted legal claims arising from the disaster could be significantly below the $20bn (£13bn) set aside by BP and a leading US campaign group, Public Citizen, ended its ‘Beyond BP’ call for a boycott of the oil company.

BP said the disaster, which involved a spill of 4.9m barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, had so far cost the company $9.5bn. Approximately 25,200 personnel, more than 2,600 vessels and dozens of aircraft remain engaged in the response effort, the company said.

Jason Kenney, an oil analyst at ING Barings, told UK paper The Guardian BP’s sale of non-core assets to pay for the disaster could, ironically, benefit the company.

“They’re still investible; they’re still credible; they’re very much alive and they could come out of this reinvigorated,” said Kenney, who believes BP is unlikely to face criminal charges for the explosion. “I think, in time, we’ll look back at this and the US will be quite happy with a record financial penalty and not necessarily look at charging BP on a criminal basis.”

A 19 September statement from the BP America chair and president Lamar McKay, marking the completion of the relief well, pressed home the message that BP was a responsible corporate player that had emerged from the “tragedy” with valuable expertise. Sidestepping any mention of “oil”, “pollution” or “deaths”, McKay set about spinning a cocoon of virtue around the company’s “accomplishment” and its eagerness to allow others to learn from its “important insights”.

“Today’s completion of relief well operations on the Macondo well is a significant technological accomplishment and another important milestone in our continued efforts to restore the Gulf Coast,” McKay’s statement said. “BP will continue sharing what we have learned in an effort to prevent a tragedy like this from ever being repeated. We also believe that the industry will gain important insights on how to be better prepared to respond to any future incidents.”

Two official US investigations are set to signal whether BP is judged “grossly negligent” in the Gulf disaster. The rulings have serious implications for the company, as they will influence whether BP alone carries the can, or whether the blame is shared with its minority partners on the Deepwater venture and with Transocean, Halliburton or Cameron, other major firms involved in development of the well.

The presidential commission investigating the disaster is due to deliver its findings in January and, at about the same time, a US coastguard panel will present its conclusions.

When it came to any suggestion of criminal liability, BP got its marker in early. In July this year it declared it did not believe it has been grossly negligent in regard to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The announcement came the day BP announced chief executive Tony Hayward was to leave his post on 1 October.

On 15 September, Hayward defended the firm’s safety record in the North Sea, insisting recent criticisms had not exposed “any fundamental weakness”. In his first and probably last UK appearance since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Hayward told a committee of MPs that disaster had been personally “devastating” because he had made safety the firm’s top priority – but he was forced to explain to the Energy and Climate Change Committee why inspections on BP’s North Sea installations found some did not comply with guidelines over regular training for operators on how to respond to an incident.

What is known already is that proven criminal culpability in the Texas City refinery explosion which killed 15 in 2005 – and which has killed a number of workers since and only this week saw two employees hospitalised with steam burns – was not enough to see any company director face criminal charges, let alone a jail term. It wasn’t even enough to get the company to remedy hundreds of safety flaws or prevent new ones.

With BP and market analysts already indicating the worst is behind them, the signs are that adding environmental devastation and 11 more deaths to the price of BP’s oil lust, will again see the company’s directors maintain their plush, well remunerated seats in the boardroom without fear of even answering for their crimes in court.

WAYWARD HAYWARD Departing BP boss Tony Hayward, 53, will receive a $940,000 yearly pension, a $1.6m pay off and more in shares. Bereaved families will not fare so well.

He’s the casualty of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe least likely to elicit sympathy. BP announced this week that beleaguered chief executive Tony Hayward, described in a US newspaper on 2 June as “the most hated – and most clueless – man in America”, is to go “by mutual agreement” on 1 October. He will be replaced in the top job by Bob Dudley, whose American accent is expected to be less galling to US ears.

Hayward – whose high profile gaffes included telling CNN, as the oil lapped the Gulf coast, “I’d like my life back” – will at 53 qualify immediately for a £600,000 ($940k) annual pension, a £1.045m ($1.6m) pay off in lieu of notice and a multi-million portfolio of company shares. He will be given a place on the board of BP’s Russian offshoot as a consolation prize and will retain his seat on BP’s global board until 30 November.

On 27 July 2010, the day Hayward’s departure was announced, BP laid a marker on its planned response to the threat of criminal action, saying BP did not believe it was “grossly negligent” in regard to the oil disaster.

BP is not just in the business of deflecting bad news; the oil giant is working flat out to manufacture a good news story. Its ‘Gulf of Mexico response’ webpages are unremittingly positive. Featured sections say variously “We’re tackling the leak at its source”, “We’re capturing oil from the ocean surface”, “We’re cleaning Gulf beaches 24/7”, “We’re paying all legitimate claims for losses” and “We’re rehabilitating birds and other wildlife”.

But BP’s constant flow of good news on the oil spill clean-up operation is not going unquestioned. This week BP monitoring figures showing even the oil clean-up workers in the riskiest jobs in the Gulf of Mexico are generally having minimal exposures to hazardous chemicals were queried by experts.

BP’s release of detailed sampling data, something urged by the official watchdog the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), met with praise from some experienced industrial hygienists but failed to assuage critics who remained sceptical that worker exposures could be so low given the amount of oil and dispersants used to battle the leak.

CLEAN START? Producing oil may be a high risk business, particularly if you plumb unmanageable depths in the world’s oceans. But BP’s problem stems from its first priority: producing profits.

Eileen Senn, an occupational hygienist and long-time workplace safety official, pointed to 10 separate shortcomings in the quality of the company’s data release, which OSHA said concentrated on workers with the heaviest potential exposures, including the move to sample for 11 chemicals when many more substances are potentially present in Gulf air.

Senn also criticised the company’s blending of samples taken where exposures were likely to be low – in areas where crude or dispersant was not nearby – with areas where exposure was more likely due to the presence of fresh oil.

“Given the 200 million gallons of oil spilled, 10 million gallons of oil burned, and 2 million gallons of dispersant applied, BP couldn’t possibly make a credible assertion that there is nothing for cleanup workers to fear in the Gulf air,” she said. “They need the illusion of science to make their audacious claim seem believable.”

If the sample is biased to those “most likely to have the heaviest exposures” – which OSHA says is the case – and the majority of these are recording no exposure at all, BP is performing an occupational health magic trick that is beyond its safety “operating management systems” in every other sphere of its operations. If the claims for this system had any element of truth, we’d never have seen the Deepwater Horizon blast kill 11.

BP certainly doesn’t achieve a similarly blemish-lite performance on safety, something evident from ‘personal safety’ and five year trend figures on its website. Its performance on occupational health is more opaque, with no similarly accessible data available online; nor is it covered in the BP 2009 annual report – a document which makes repeat references to improving safety performance.

BP is also employing an army of novices working in difficult environments who, by any estimation, would normally be expected to be at higher risk than workers better versed in the use and hazards of chemicals. And included in their number is prison labour.

A 21 July report in The Nation notes: “By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced – and it gets lucrative tax write-offs in the process.” It adds: “Work release inmates are required to work for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, sometimes averaging seventy-two hours per week. These are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic job in America… Inmates can’t pick and choose their work assignments and they face considerable repercussions for rejecting any job, including loss of earned ‘good time’.”

Commenting on the decision to step down in October, BP chief executive Tony Hayward said: “The Gulf of Mexico explosion was a terrible tragedy for which – as the man in charge of BP when it happened – I will always feel a deep responsibility, regardless of where blame is ultimately found to lie.” Parroting the good news story on the BP Gulf response webpage, he added: “We have now capped the oil flow and we are doing everything within our power to clean up the spill and to make restitution to everyone with legitimate claims.”

This includes less celebrated casualties of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, notably the 11 rig workers who died, whose dependants are between them unlikely to receive “legitimate” recompense totalling anything like the lifetime supply of BP cash Hayward is to enjoy. His pension pot already is valued at about £11m.

BP hopes the departure of Hayward will be the beginning of the end for its Gulf of Mexico woes, and the reputational harm that came with it.

However, just three years ago when Hayward took over the helm, BP was also hoping a change of leadership would create clear blue water between the firm and other safety and environmental blunders, notably the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 on the watch of Hayward’s cost-cutting predecessor Lord John Browne.

Hayward at the time told journalists his number one task was to “focus like a laser” on safety and reliability. He delivered neither. Not only was he leading the company when it was implicated in the worst environmental catastrophe in US history, a failure to remedy serious safety violations following the Texas City tragedy saw BP as recently as 30 October 2009 receive the USA’s largest ever safety fine.

Producing oil may be a high risk business, particularly if you plumb unmanageable depths in the world’s oceans. But BP’s problem stems from its first priority: producing profits. Like Browne and Hayward before him, new CEO Bob Dudley will be judged on the bottom line.

Without a substantial improvement in the regulation and scrutiny of the industry, in the US and internationally, safety and the environment could once again be the casualty.

An entry in the blog of nationally syndicated US journalist Thom Hartmann notes: “It looks like the ironic outcome of the BP mess will come in the form of a truly poetic gesture that involves a middle finger offered by BP’s treasurer to British and American taxpayers.”

It cites the Financial Times, which reported that “BP is forecast to pay about $10bn less tax over the next four years as it meets the costs of its huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, hitting the revenues of Britain and the US that receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the company each year.”

Because the laws of both the US and the UK allow companies to deduct from their taxes what are called “business expenses” – and that includes cleaning up messes caused by doing business the wrong way, cutting corners and violating safety and environmental laws – “BP will transfer about a third of all their costs of dealing with the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster away from the company and directly onto the taxpayers of the US and the UK by deducting all these costs from their taxable profits,” says the blog.

The Financial Times noted: “Of its principal expected liabilities, only the fines that might be imposed by the US authorities would definitely not be tax-deductible.”

It’s one reasons why jail terms on the oil giant’s directors for their safety and environmental crimes might have a more salutary effect on BP’s boardroom behaviour. It would certainly be a rare bonus for the rest of us.

BROWNE STUFF In 2007, Hazards magazine suggested BP's Lord Browne should be behind bars. Now he's the UK's unelected Czar.

John Browne, Tony Hayward’s predecessor as chief executive of BP, has been appointed by the UK government to oversee moves to make Whitehall “more businesslike.” Lord Browne was the architect of the much criticised BP cost- and safety-cutting strategy implicated in the Texas City refinery disaster, which killed 15, and a sequence of other safety and environmental crimes.

The scope of the peer’s shake-up of government will include all ministries, including those responsible for workplace and environmental safety and the energy industry.

Commenting on his appointment as a ‘lead non-executive director’ in government, Lord Browne said: “This is a role within government but also independent of it. Its purpose is to assist in the delivery of policy using relevant experience from business. There is a great need for the best of the business community to be involved during these challenging times for the UK.”

Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, said: “His experience will be a real benefit in our drive to make Whitehall work in a more businesslike manner and I am looking forward to working with him to implement our vital reform programme.”

The Conservative Party, which leads the UK’s coalition government, is wedded to the idea of a business-friendly, “burden” lifting, programme of deregulation. The coalition has already embarked on a review of health and safety regulation, and a Conservative policy paper pre-election promised “the powers of government inspectors will be drastically curbed”, adding the party’s objective was “taming regulators” by “replacing regulator-run public teams of inspectors with a model closer to financial controls and audits.” In the UK, far and away the two biggest regulators are the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

The model is, in effect, that secured by BP and other oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico, where firm regulation was sacrificed in favour of paper agreements and oil industry self-regulation.

The worker safety standards in place for offshore oil rigs before the Deepwater Horizon blast were voluntary and developed in consultation with the oil industry, a senior official at the retooled Minerals Management Service (MMS) – in a seemingly premature move renamed last month as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement - admitted to US lawmakers on 23 June.

Doug Slitor, now the acting chief of offshore regulatory programmes at the reorganised agency, told members of the House Education and Labor Committee that his office is working to turn the worker safety guidelines – drafted with the oil industry lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute – into a mandatory programme.

Rep. George Miller, chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, commented that BP was “a multinational corporation with a dismal safety record in this country.” A share of the more egregious crimes occurred while the company was under the direction of Lord Browne – Tony Hayward took over the reins in 2007.

Questions have already been raised about the company’s safety record in the UK, where the troubled oil giant has been caught breaking health and safety regulations 54 times over the past five years. Health and Safety Executive (HSE) enforcement database show the official action against the British multinational relates to a series of maintenance and operating lapses which put workers and the environment at risk from major leaks, fires and accidents in the North Sea and elsewhere.

As a result HSE has served BP companies with 21 legal enforcement notices since 2006, requiring lax and dangerous practices to be improved. The company, however, has not been prosecuted by the watchdog since 2005.

The analysis of the HSE enforcement database shows that four BP companies – BP Exploration, BP Oil UK, BP Chemicals and BP Shipping – have been hit with legal notices in the last five years. There have been 54 breaches of eight health and safety laws or regulations. A BP spokesperson said the company’s safety record compared well to that of others, adding: “We are never complacent and are continually looking at ways to reduce even the smallest of leaks.”

But Juliet Swann of Friends of the Earth Scotland said: “Companies like BP have for years been taking shortcuts with safety that risk human life, the environment and people’s pensions.”

WELL WELL BP global CEO Tony Hayward has agreed to President Obama's demand for a compensation fund. This year's $5bn payment will still leave the UK-based oil giant with change of $600 million from its 2010 first quarter profits.

Members of the US Congress tore into the big energy corporations on 15 June for filing almost identical Gulf of Mexico oil spill response plans – which included contact details for a deceased scientist and steps to protect marine mammals not found in the region’s waters.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell all have identical response plans to BP, said House energy and commerce committee chair Henry Waxman. The verbal assault by committee members undermined attempts by the oil giants to suggest that their working practices differ from those of BP; and that the catastrophe, which killed 11 workers, would not have happened if the well had been theirs.

Leading the committee’s questioning of energy executives, Democrat Ed Markey focused on their spill response plans. “They cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words,” he said. He added: “Like BP, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for three million years.”

Under pressure from US president Barack Obama and ahead of a congressional grilling for BP’s London-based chief executive Tony Hayward this week, BP agreed to the president’s demand for the creation of a $20bn (£13.5bn) compensation fund for victims of the Gulf oil spill. The company also told the president it would not pay shareholders a dividend this year – the first time this has happened since World War II. BP’s shares rose sharply on news of the deal.

The agreement requires BP to pay $5bn into the fund this year, significantly less than its first quarter profits. A week after the rig exploded on 20 April, BP announced profits from January to March 2010 of $5.6 billion (£3.6bn).

The US president has expressed renewed interest in a clean energy plan in the wake of the Gulf disaster.

OILY PROBLEM David Cameron tries to grease UK-US relations in a post-BP sliming phone call to US president Barack Obama. But the prime minister also wants to remove legal 'burdens' on business - like safety and environmental regulations.

It’s a story that owes more to the ostrich than the oil covered pelican.

The 14 June screen grab from the front page of the UK Prime Minister’s website shows David Cameron in a phone call to US President Barack Obama, discussing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill calamity.

Cameron’s spokesperson commented: “The prime minister expressed his sadness at the ongoing human and environmental catastrophe in Louisiana,” adding: “President Obama said to the Prime Minister that his unequivocal view was that BP was a multinational global company and that frustrations about the oil spill had nothing to do with national identity. The Prime Minister stressed the economic importance of BP to the UK, US and other countries. The President made clear that he had no interest in undermining BP’s value.”

The disaster, which observers increasingly accept was a product of inadequate regulation, oversight and enforcement, has hobbled a major UK-based firm, caused incalculable economic and environmental damage, has strained relations between the US and the UK and has led for calls for directors of BP to face criminal charges.

There have already been less celebrated casualties, notably the 11 workers who died when the rig exploded on 20 April. Since then many workers involved in the cleanup operation – possibly hundreds – have fallen sick as a result of heat stroke, chemical exposures and other hazards.

Still, with the phone call over it was back to business as usual for the UK Prime Minister – pandering to the business lobby and announcing a review of health and safety legislation, the next headline on the 10 Downing Street website.

Commenting on the review, which forms part of a wider commitment to deregulation targeting all government departments and regulators, the Prime Minister said: “The rise of the compensation culture over the last ten years is a real concern, as is the way health and safety rules are sometimes applied. We need a sensible new approach that makes clear these laws are intended to protect people, not overwhelm businesses with red tape.”

Only there has not been a rise in compensation culture and businesses are not overwhelmed with red tape. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the UK trade union body TUC, said he was “surprised the government is addressing the ‘compensation culture’ again as successive reports show there is no such thing and claims have been falling over the past ten years.” He added: “This will not be an open and frank review aimed at achieving better regulation. Instead it is an attempt to undermine the already limited protection that workers have by focusing on the needs of business.”

The UK union leader concluded: “Businesses are responsible for a working culture that injures a quarter of a million workers every year and makes a further half a million employees ill. The review should by investigating this instead. Rather than focusing solely on the ‘needs of business’, the government should protect workers by increasing inspections and enforcement action against employers who put their staff at risk by ignoring existing laws, as well as introducing a legal duty on directors to protect their workers.”

Whether you are talking the mine deaths at Massey Energy, the refinery deaths at Texas City or the offshore deaths in the Gulf of Mexico, the common theme is a failure of responsibility and accountability on the part of companies. You can pair that each time with a failure of official regulation and oversight on the part of government.

Hand-wringing from Cameron and other political leaders over the “sadness” unleashed by BP, Transocean, Halliburton and the litany of deadly businesses from Union Carbide to Massey to McWane, is a seriously unsatisfactory alternative to protecting lives, livelihoods and the environment.

To do that governments must behave responsibly, and that means more than just demanding responsibility from business. It means less time spent appeasing regulation averse boardrooms and more time regulating them. What business calls “red tape” is for many workers their lifeline. Removing or not enforcing legal protections makes a government an accessory to the crime.

THE BUCK STOPS HERE: Decisions made in BP's London boardroom have led to disasters. Shouldn't BP's directors be held accountable in the courts?

BP’s cavalier but usually profitable management practices have been implicated in a series of disasters. The company has been tried and found guilty of environmentally damaging, sometimes deadly and certainly criminal safety offences. But bullish denials, occasional (fleeting) acts of contrition and a short period of calm have seen the company swiftly rehabilitated in the eyes of politicians, regulators and the media.

This time, with oily-footprints leading with each successive staggering blunder all the way to BP’s London HQ, will the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe result in company executives being held personally liable for corporate safety and environmental crimes? Will BP’s directors for once be called to account to the bereaved and dispossessed, and not just the financial markets?

LIFE LINE: BP chief executive Tony Hayward says he wants his life back. Eleven workers died on 20 April in the incident that prompted his outburst.

BP’s current chief executive, Tony Hayward, has shown none of the assured grace of his predecessor, Lord John Browne, who survived with reputation unsullied the deaths of 15 workers in a 2005 blast at the company’s Texas City refinery.

Browne was certainly culpable, but instead of facing jail time was feted for turning around a company which posted a loss in 1992, the year he joined the global board. After taking the helm in 1995, his leadership led to an unprecedented period of profitability, the soubriquet of ‘Sun King’ in the financial press and, on his resignation in 2007, a payout from the company reputed to total £72 million.

It took some time after the 20 April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion for it to become apparent Hayward lacked the deft teflon touch of his mentor. Certainly, initial reports on the 11 fatalities on the rig had caused little discomfort to BP and its board – the deaths of roustabouts and roughnecks was a news story, not a disaster. In reputational and therefore monetary terms, those deaths just didn’t count.

And at first there was sufficient confusion about responsibility – BP owned the well, Transocean operated the rig – for Hayward to attempt what turned out to be his biggest strategic mistake. It wasn’t BP’s fault, it was just BP’s oil, the chief executive intimated.

Hayward told the US Today show on 3 May: “It wasn’t our accident. But we are absolutely responsible for the oil, for cleaning it up and that’s what we intend to do. The drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig, it was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people with their processes. But our responsibility is the oil and it is ours to clean it up.”

The BP chief was facing a different sort of headache to his mentor – a disaster that would not die down coming on the heels of a sequence of massive safety and environmental fines. The saga of BP’s blundering on the sea bed fed more bad news stories about the company and allowed sufficient time for more probing questions to be asked.

So, instead of concentrating on just what bit of equipment failed, the spotlight fell on why a multinational making massive profits was involved in such a devastating incident and why it had neither the foresight to prevent it nor the systems to cope with the aftermath. The ongoing scrutiny and growing criticism of BP drove an exasperated Tony Hayward to ask fellow executives at the company’s London HQ: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

According to Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen: “’Deserve’ in this context is a strange sentiment. But if Hayward had asked what in the hell BP did to cause the disaster, emerging evidence suggests the answers are straightforward: recklessly proceed with extreme deepwater drilling that far exceeds the ability of industry to control problems; fail to invest properly in safety, including in relatively cheap safety equipment; fail to oversee its contractors sufficiently; and order drilling operations to skirt safety measures.”

A month into the story, there were even murmurings of concern that 11 families had lost a loved one, a breadwinner, in the Gulf of Mexico. Shouldn’t someone put their hands up and admit guilt for that? Don’t the families deserve an explanation? Don’t they deserve justice?

Hayward by this time was floundering. On 30 May, commenting on the impact of the Gulf of Mexico spill on affected communities, he told CNN: “I’m sorry. We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.” Eleven workers had died in the explosion. Hayward’s comments smacked of at best insensitivity, at worst indifference, something that didn’t escape the media.

But Hayward is only human, and shouldn’t be castigated for making crass comments when clearly under stress.

It’s the decisions Hayward and his fellow executives made in the calm of BP’s London boardroom that deserve forensic scrutiny and criticism. The Gulf of Mexico disaster and others like Texas City were a consequence of an explicit drive to increase profits while cutting costs, a plan masterminded and implemented by Lord Browne and his protégé, Tony Hayward. The sort of policies that guarantee profits now, but that just as surely increase risks.

It may be Hayward was in one respect unlucky; that the 20 April disaster was the tipping point. After a decade in which the company had received the largest ever safety fines in both the US and the UK, maybe the blood-stained slick spreading across the gulf was just one disaster too many.

It was no accident that 11 workers died in the Gulf of Mexico, no more than it was an accident when 15 died at BP’s Texas City refinery. Tony Hayward should be sorry. He should also be in court, explaining why a company that was making profits of $2.6 million every hour around the clock in the months before the gulf disaster, again and again spills blood for oil.

BLOOD PRESSURE: Workers cleaning up the oil spill for BP say they are suffering irritant effects and high blood pressure. Eleven died when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded.

A chemical dispersant being used to fight the gulf oil spill is making workers sick, recent reports suggest. The disaster, where BP has repeatedly failed to stem the oil gusher and which started with a 20 April explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers, has led to an increasing clamour for criminal charges to be levelled at the London-based multinational, which owns the well and is responsible for the cleanup.

Last week seven crew members aboard fishing vessels who had been working to cleanup Breton Sound, southeast of New Orleans, blamed the dispersant chemicals for health complaints including nausea, shortness of breath and high blood pressure. All were working on a cleanup crew south of Venice, Louisiana, and were admitted to hospital. Doctors who examined them said that their conditions were “related to some kind of irritant, combined with dehydration”.

The US government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had earlier asked BP to stop using the dispersant, known as Corexit, and find a safer alternative. BP disputed the agency’s assessment of its level of toxicity.

The Los Angeles Times reports a 25 May memo from David Michaels, head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the incident commander, expressed “serious concerns” for the safety of workers involved in the spill cleanup.

The problems, Michaels wrote, “appear to be indicative of a general systemic failure on BP’s part to ensure the safety and health of those responding to this disaster.’” He complained that OSHA had repeatedly asked BP to develop a plan for protecting employees during inclement weather, but had yet to receive one, that the oil company had been slow in reporting sickness among workers, and that heat-related illness remains a serious concern.

Expressing growing frustration, Michaels wrote that the BP official in charge of worker safety “does not appear to operate with the full support of the company, nor does he seem to have the authority necessary for the job which he has been tasked.”

Like previous BP-related disasters in Alaska and Texas, evidence has emerged that appears to show BP knowingly cut corners on maintenance and safety on Deepwater Horizon’s operations, which some commentators believe could amount to criminal violations of the Clean Water Act.

Others say that because people were killed, BP and company officials should face prosecution for negligent and reckless homicide, although charge the deaths have been largely overlooked as the focus has been on the environmental catastrophe.

“The worker safety issue has been completely lost in this story,” said Tom O’Connor, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. “It’s one of the biggest industrial disasters in recent history, and yet Congress [views it] the same as the public: They’re not seeing it as a worker safety issue.”

Federal statistics support O’Connor’s call for concern. Between 2003 and 2008, 646 US oil and gas workers were killed on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including 120 in 2008.