On April 21st 2010 an explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sadly caused the death of eleven people working on the rig. The fall out from this had been quite far reaching, perhaps what BP didn’t realise at the time was that coming up on their horizon was a deep-mess as opposed to deep-water. The rig itself is quite an engineering masterpiece, it drilled down to the deepest oil well ever, at the time, this was the biggest bore ever – until Katie Price’s fly-on-the-wall documentary What Katie Did Next aired on ITV2.
Many of the locals of the Gulf of Mexico have been vocal in the dismay at the handling of the crisis and of the level of oil seeping into the ocean, their criticism has been aimed at both BP and President Obama. It is slightly ironic that a country who is prepared to fight wars in order to secure oil (allegedly) starts complaining when BP delivers oil direct to many Americans’ doorsteps around the Gulf of Mexico.
This spillage is probably the greatest oil disaster to affect America since The Gulf War and BP’s attempts to deal with stemming the flow of oil were about as fast as John Prescott running the 400 metre hurdles and about as successful as him trying to climb through a cat-flap. I wouldn’t go as far to say that BP tried everything to stop the oil leak, but they certainly tried anything, including golf balls and mud – such ideas were probably thought up by men and this combination also signified the first time golf had been involved in so much muck and dirt since the Tiger Woods scandal.
Two men appear to have taken a lot of criticism for the poor response to the spillage; one of them is President Obama who appears to be a fault because he hasn’t personally swan down to the bottom of the ocean with some plumbing equipment and henceforth plugged the leak - which BP appeared to trying to plug by using a vast amount of public relations, just type “BP oil leak” into Google to find out more about how they are helping.
The whole notion that President Obama wasn’t doing enough possibly stems from the fact that he hasn’t spent long enough on the shore saying how bad the situation was and asking the people affected “how they feel” etc. - this is a far cry from how things were 18 months ago when Obama would presumably have been able to view the site of the explosion and assess the damage first hand, by walking out there on the water. Nonetheless, President Obama has levelled criticism at BP and has had crisis talks with David Cameron, where Obama presumably went in there to “kick ass” and Cameron to “lick ass”. Whilst BP finally stemmed the flow of oil by putting a large metal cap on the haemorrhaging rig, they must also have been tempted to put a large metal lid on President Obama after his criticism of them.
The other man bearing a large portion of the public disapproval is BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward. This is a man who complained on Facebook that he “wanted his life back” - perhaps no-one explained to him that his highly paid job as the head of a multi-national listed company actually involved working long hard days every now and again.
Aside from this he was also publically castigated for going out sailing in around Isle of Wight a few Sundays ago. I have no problem with him doing this, he is still a human being and having worked constantly over the last few months he is allowed to relax with his friends and family. Granted he was out in the public, but he did not ask people to take photos of him and he presumably didn’t want people making a fuss regarding the perfectly acceptable activity he was pursuing during his leisure time.
That said, after the sailing trip he soon did get to know the meaning of hard work - he was forced to spend hours cleaning all the oil off his boat…
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