Ready Ye Pitchforks: Company Responsible for Gulf Oil Spill Hands Out Safety Bonuses
After the worst oil spill in history, a spill that lasted for 86 days and spilled more then 200 million gallons of crude oil into the gulf, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil rig is handing out bonuses for the company’s good safety record last year.
Transocean Ltd, which owned the Deepwater Horizon and leased it to BP prior to the explosion that caused the spill, is giving bonuses to its executives for having its “best year in safety performance” in its history.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Safety performance makes up 25 percent of the potential bonuses for Transocean executives. And that leads to the best use of “notwithstanding” you’ll ever read:
“Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate (“TRIR”) and total potential severity rate (“TPSR”),” Transocean wrote. “As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere.”
These statistics served as the justification for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be given out to company executives as part of their yearly round of bonuses.
It would seem there’s no real world event that can’t be made to look insignificant under the weight of statistics. It is true only one of their other rigs exploded and caused an oil spill that changed and destroyed ways of life for millions of Americans. So let’s call that a win for the company.
Most of the executives received two-thirds of what their potential safety bonus would have been if there hadn’t been an incident. In its statement the company said that part the part of the bonus that’s based on the incidents themselves was cut.
Here’s more of the breakdown of the bonuses from the Wall Street Journal:
So somehow the worst oil spill in history doesn’t rank as a “severe” incident? Apparently it was a factor in their formula, just not in a way that would make any kind of sense to someone outside the corporate world. Their statistic for the company’s safety record only reports the Deepwater Horizon’s catastrophic explosion and loss of life as a single incident, insignificant next to all the other successes of the year. As a result, they maintain an excellent safety record for all its other rigs.
The Gulf Oil Spill caused the deaths of 11 people, spilled 205 million gallons of oil into the Gulf and potentially destroyed a way of life for all the Gulf Coast residents that relied on fishing and tourism for their livelihoods. Now, almost a year later, there are thousands of people reporting abnormal health problems, proving that the spill may have had further reaching consequences then was originally thought.
Transocean still maintains that they’re not a fault for the explosion and subsequent spill since they were leasing the rig to BP. Because BP was operating the rig at the time of the incident, Transocean says that liability falls to them. The government essentially agreed, holding BP liable for the costs of the cleanup.
A little over two weeks ago, the U.S. Interior Department and Coast Guard issued subpoenas to three Transocean employees as part of hearings scheduled for next week aimed at examining the design and performance of the company’s blowout preventer, a giant set of valves that’s meant to act as the last line of defense against an oil spill.
By now we’re all used to the absurdity and the hypocrisy that goes along with being a corporate CEO. No matter how bad your company performs or how reprehensible your actions, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get bonuses at the end of the year. You would think, though, that someone in their PR department would point out that there’s a chance this will play badly in the press and maybe stop the company from using the phrase “safety bonuses” when handing out giant checks.
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