BP’s Experiments With Truth

Posted by on . 4 comments.

Even at this stage of the game, BP continues to play fast and loose with the truth.

The top kill procedure at the Deepwater Horizon site started on Wednesday, at 1 p.m. CDT.

For about ten hours, BP’s engineers pumped the heavy drilling mud into the blown well. Around 11 p.m. CDT on Wednesday, this operation was suspended.

Thursday morning, BP spokesmen were cheerfully telling the whole world that the operation had continued through the night:

A BP spokeswoman said that the operation had continued through the night, but said there were “no significant events” to report on its progress.

Thursday afternoon, the story was that it was going as planned:

More than 24 hours after BP began a crucial “top kill” effort to plug the deep-sea well with heavy drilling mud, company executives said the procedure was going as planned but they were not ready to declare success.

It was only Thursday evening that they got around to revealing that the pumping of drilling mud had been suspended on Wednesday night:

Early Thursday, officials said the process was going well, but later in the day they announced pumping had been suspended 16 hours earlier.

This is Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, “explaining” why BP didn’t announce for 16 hours that it had suspended the top kill:

“I probably should apologize to folks that we haven’t been giving more data on that,” Suttles said when asked why it took so long for BP to announce it had suspended the top kill. “It was nothing more than we are so focused on the operation itself.”

Hopefully, someone will hold Suttles’ feet to the fire, and ask him to explain not just the sin of omission — which can be dismissed with a “Ha, ha! Oops!” — but all the sins of commission too. What was BP focused on when, long after the suspension, its spokesmen said that the operation had continued through the night, that there were “no significant events” to report, that the procedure was going as planned, that the process was going well?

If this isn’t corporate lying at its most baldfaced, just let me know what is, and I’ll duly applaud the company that outlied BP. (You know BP, right? The Bullshit People?)

Previous posts:
May 27: Quote Of The Day
May 26: Scenes From A Spill
May 24: How Retarded Can One Corporation Be?
May 18: BP’s Strategy Pays Off
May 17: On The Evolution Of The Deepwater Horizon Spill Rate Estimate

Comments

  1. TheraP says:
    May 28, 2010 at 7:47 pm

    Thank you for digging out the quotes. It’s been ever so frustrating that these folks aid and abet disinformation. They are thus wasting my time and yours along with destroying their own trustworthiness.

    I like your moniker for bp!

  2. SocraticGadfly says:
    May 28, 2010 at 10:54 pm

    Fire Kenny Boy Salazar, Obama! Your second-worst Cabinet nominee and moving to No. 1!

  3. sarabeth says:
    May 29, 2010 at 4:16 am

    What really gets me is how AP seems to accept it with perfect equanimity that “Early Thursday, officials said the process was going well, but later in the day they announced pumping had been suspended 16 hours earlier.”

    There’s no outrage whatsoever. And that statement is buried a good 10 paragraphs into their story.

    And no one else in the mainstream media seems to have even got to the point of pointing out that BP said things all through Thursday that were revealed in the evening to be outright lies.

    So when you talk about aiding and abetting disinformation, the media is playing a starring role too.

  4. Jamaal Adam says:
    May 29, 2010 at 11:31 am

    I live 5000 miles up north west in Canada. Yet I am besieged by anxiety about the ongoing destruction of a vital environment of the gulf, which will affect us Canadians in the long run. BP’s lies, deceipt, inneptitude, greed and arrogance are a source of raging anger to many of us, who stand helpless in the face of mounting man-made disaster of the oil spill in the gulf. “Even as the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has raised fears about the safety of offshore drilling, Chevron Canada Ltd. is going ahead with plans this week to drill one of the deepest offshore oil wells in the world off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador”. You can read the news of this annoucements on this site ( http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100510/chevron-oil-well-100510/20100510?hub=TopStoriesV2 ). It is unnerving that such an annoucement would come at such an inopportune time, not to mention the fact that the well will be located nearly at twice the depth ad the Deep Horizon. God help us.