BP (NYSE:BP): Not Their First Oil Spill Disaster

Apparently this is not BP's (NYSE:BP) first oil spill catastrophe. Just four years ago they had another massive oil spill in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. There was a 16 mile stretch of pipe that was corroded. This was discovered only a year after a BP refinery exploded in Texas City, Texas where 15 workers were killed and hundreds more injured.

Due to the many violations that were found to have contributed to the Texas City explosion, BP was fined $21 million. It also was mandatory that they were required to shutdown their Alaska oil drill site to make repairs to the corroded pipe. There seems to be a pattern with BP, for these two incidents to happen within a year of each other and now here we are again with BP causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

BP's chief executive prior to Tony Hayward was John Browne, Hayward's mentor. Browne was with BP for close to 10 years before resigning in 2007. "We have to get the priorities right and job number one is to get to these things that have happened, get them fixed and get them sorted out. We don't just sort them out on the surface we get them fixed deeply, said Browne in an interview four years ago after the Texas City and Alaskan catastrophe's.

The thing is BP had four years to fix their problems and if they had, we would not be watching the horror unfold of the worst oil spill in U.S. history.
Brown built BP by taking over other oil companies. Everyone in the oil business new he would then fire the best engineers and ruthlessly cutting costs.