Spill panel: BP, firms made 'egregiously bad' decisions, need revamp

A leader of the presidential panel investigating the BP oil spill said the three major companies involved in the disaster need a major overhaul following their “egregiously” bad decisions in drilling the ill-fated Macondo well.

William Reilly — the co-chairman of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offhsore Drilling — spoke a day after a marathon panel hearing delved into what caused the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

“Whatever else we learned and saw yesterday, it was emphatically not a culture of safety on that rig,” Reilly said Tuesday at the outset of the second day of the panel’s two-day hearing.

He said the commission probe has revealed a “ghastly” story of “one bad call after another,” including the decision to proceed after failed cement tests, well pressure tests that were mistakenly judged a success and others.

BP, rig owner Transocean and contractor Halliburton were all responsible for “one or more egregiously bad decisions,” said Reilly, a Republican who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush. His comments suggest the panel could be preparing to broadly assign blame for the accident in its final report to the White House in January.

“BP, Halliburton and Transocean are major respected companies, operating throughout the Gulf, and the evidence is that they are in need of top-to-bottom reform,” Reilly said.

Reilly's comments may be a way to try to distance the commission from criticism that its tentative findings so far largely mirror those of BP's own internal spill probe. The commission's staff, for example, has concluded that oil and gas blew up through the center of the well when it ruptured, which BP argues shows the company's well design was not at fault, as Democrats and other critics claim.

Darren Goode contributed.

This post was updated at 10:39 a.m.

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