Prudhoe Bay Oil Spill - Warnings

Warnings

Red flags and warning signs had been raised about corrosion on several occasions both from within and outside the organization but had been ignored. The 1992 tests on the eastern line had indicated the presence of calcium in the line, but nothing was done about it. A company report in year 2005 said BP based its corrosion-fighting on a limited budget instead of needs.

Employees had raised their concerns before the actual incident, which were ignored by BP management. In an e-mail to a company lawyer in June 2004, Marc Kovac, an official of the United Steelworkers union representing workers at the BP facility, forwarded a collection of his earlier complaints to management. One of these, dated February 28, 2003, concerned "corrosion monitoring staffing levels". It began, "The corrosion monitoring crew will soon be reduced to six staff down from eight." Initially BP denied that they took money-saving measures maintaining the pipeline. Robert Malone, the chairman of BP America, cited a report commissioned by BP which concluded that "budget increases alone would not have prevented the leak". He later admitted that there "was a concerted effort to manage the costs in response to the continuing decline in production at Prudhoe Bay". One of the reasons for the pipeline failure was an insufficient level of corrosion inhibitor, a liquid which resists corrosion of pipeline by the corroding liquid, which is water. John Dingell read from an internal BP email that said budgetary constraints would force the end of a programme to inject corrosion inhibitor directly into the pipeline system. The process of injecting corrosion inhibitor directly into a pipeline, though costly, is much more effective than injecting in a process plant.

In the subsequent investigation, Carolyn Merritt, chief executive officer of the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, told the committee that "virtually all" of the root causes of the problems at Prudhoe Bay had "strong echoes" of those that led to the 2005 explosion in Houston. These had included cost cutting and a failure to invest in the plant. The committee was also told that the spillage happened at a time when BP was making huge profits.

The leak detection system measures the volumes of fluid entering each pipeline segment and the volumes of fluid leaving each segment. The system triggers an alarm if the volume measurements don't match up. The leak detection alarm sounded four times during the week before the spill was discovered, but BP interpreted the leak detection alarms as false alarms.