BP Plc. and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
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I. Overview of the Organisational Failure/Problem

I. (a) What happened
The night of April 20, 2010 forever changed regulators approach to supervision of deepwater oil and gas drilling. It was also the night when years and years of â€˜cutting cornersâ€™ finally caught up with BP marking the beginning of the worst environmental catastrophe in history for a company in the oil and gas industry (Osofsky, 2011). On that night, a 126-strong workforce drawn from three companies was working on a semi-submersible mobile drilling unit called â€˜Deepwater Horizonâ€™ which belonged to a Switzerland-based company called Transocean Ltd. Transocean is an offshore drilling company which offer offshore drilling services to companies in the oil and gas industry. The company along with Halliburton Company was a contractor for BP Plc. running the Macondo oil well off the Gulf of Mexico. An explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig that night resulted in 11 deaths and 17 casualties and marked the beginning of an oil spill that lasted nearly three months

I. (b) The Context
11 employees dying while doing their jobs is disastrous for any company to deal with and BP was no exception as the company faced a lot of media backlash following the news that the explosion had resulted in employee deaths (Hamilton, Safford & Ulrich, 2012). However, it is the ensuing oil spill that damaged BPâ€™s image the most because despite the companyâ€™s reassurance that the leakage would be contained within a short period it continued unabated for 87 consecutive days. In the end the oil spill destroyed marine ecosystems along the Gulf of Mexico negatively impacting industries such as fishing and tourism among others. A judicial probe and independent investigations by other organisations were unanimous that the disaster resulted from BPâ€™s appetite for riskier and riskier offshore projects (Hamilton, Safford & Ulrich, 2012).

BP spent considerable resources not only to cap the well that was leaking, but also in the cleanup efforts that lasted nearly five years and cost the company approximately $14 billion. However, during the

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