Fred H. Bartlit Jr., a prominent trial lawyer hired to lead the panel’s inquiry, disputed the findings of other investigators, including plaintiffs’ lawyers and members of Congress, who have charged that BP and its main partners, Transocean and Halliburton, had cut corners to speed completion of the well, which cost $1.5 million a day to drill.
“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” Mr. Bartlit said on Monday as he opened a detailed presentation on the causes of the April 20 disaster on a drilling rig off the Louisiana coast, which killed 11 workers and led to the biggest offshore oil spill in American history. “They want to be efficient, they don’t want to waste money, but they also don’t want to get their buddies killed.”
Mr. Bartlit noted that a number of critical questions about the accident remained in dispute, including the cause of the failure of the cement at the bottom of the well, why BP and its partners went ahead with trying to close in the well after it failed an important pressure test and why crew members failed for too long to recognize that oil and gas were gushing up the well bore.
He indicated that a number of the contributing causes of the explosion might remain a mystery, because the evidence sank with the drilling rig or because the causes arose from decisions made by men who were killed or badly injured in the blowout.
Just hours before the explosion, employees of BP and Transocean, the operator of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, accepted the results of a pressure test that should have raised serious alarms, Mr. Bartlit and his aides found. Instead of acting on the information, they took no steps to keep the explosive oil and gas mixture out of the well, a decision that Mr. Bartlit and his team concluded contributed to the accident.
“The interesting question is why these experienced men out on that rig talked themselves into believing that this was a good test that indicated well integrity,” said Sean Grimsley, one of Mr. Bartlit’s deputies. “None of them wanted to die or jeopardize their safety. The question is why.”
Mr. Bartlit’s presentation resembled a prosecutor’s opening argument in a major criminal trial. He used elaborate graphics to illustrate the complex technology used on the BP well, known as the Macondo well, as he walked the seven-member presidential commission and an audience of lawyers, company officials and journalists through his preliminary findings.
He said, however, that his purpose was to explain, not to accuse. “We are not assigning blame,” he said. “We are not making any legal judgments on liability, negligence or gross negligence or any legal issues at all. It’s a hard thing to do. Our effort is to look at cause, not liability.”
Mr. Bartlit also said he had been handicapped by Congress’s refusal to grant the commission subpoena power. He said he had no reason to believe that any of the company officials he interviewed had lied or withheld relevant data, but he said that his months of investigation had left a number of disputes among the responsible parties unresolved. He said he could not settle those matters without deposing workers and executives under oath.
President Obama appointed the commission, led by Bob Graham, a former Democratic senator and governor from Florida, and William K. Reilly, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President George Bush, in May. The panel is scheduled to deliver its findings and recommendations in mid-January.
Mr. Graham said Monday that he would ask Congress to reconsider granting the panel subpoena power.
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, took issue with Mr. Bartlit’s characterization of the motives of BP and some of its employees. Mr. Markey, who led a Congressional investigation into the accident, said the company had consistently taken shortcuts to save money.
“When the culture of a company favors risk-taking and cutting corners above other concerns, systemic failures like this oil spill disaster result without direct decisions being made or trade-offs being considered,” he said. “What is fully evident, from BP’s pipeline spill in Alaska and the Texas City refinery disaster, to the Deepwater Horizon well failure, is that BP has a long and sordid history of cutting costs and pushing the limits in search of higher profits.”
The first part of Mr. Bartlit’s presentation focused on BP’s well design and the repeated problems BP and Halliburton encountered in preparing the well for cementing, a process meant to keep oil and gas, which are under high pressure in the well, from exploding up the well bore.
The commission has concluded that problems with the cement job were a major cause of the well disaster, although Mr. Bartlit emphasized on Monday that a deepwater well was a complicated system and that no single error or flaw was solely responsible.
Mr. Bartlit said he could not reach any conclusions about one critical component in the well, the blowout preventer, which is supposed to be the last line of defense against a well’s going out of control.
The blowout preventer that was on the Macondo well is in the hands of federal agents as possible evidence in criminal and civil trials. The government has hired a Norwegian engineering firm to examine it and determine if and how it might have failed. Mr. Bartlit said his investigation would not be complete until he had the results of that study.
Bill Ambrose, director of special projects for Transocean, which owned and ran the blowout preventer, said at the hearing that the device had functioned “within its design limits,” suggesting that its failure was a result, not a cause, of the accident.
The hearing did not resolve the additional question of whether BP made a fatal error by not installing enough “centralizers,” devices used to keep the drill casing centered within the well bore. Halliburton, the cement contractor, has said that the decision on centralizers was part of the reason the cement job failed. BP disputes that contention.
