Investigator: BP didn't put money first

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- The lead investigator into what caused the disastrous oil in the Gulf of Mexico said Monday he found no indication that BP put money concerns over safety.

"To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety," Fred Bartlit, chief council for the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, said during a public hearing on the preliminary findings of what caused BP's Macondo well to leak 185 million gallons of oil from mid-April to mid-July. "We have not found a situation where we could say a man had a choice between safety and dollars and put his money on dollars. We haven't seen it. And if anybody has anything like that, we, of course, welcome it."

Bartlit presented a step-by-step, segment-by-segment walk-through of what happens in deep-water drilling and the event ahead of the April 20 explosion of the well that killed 11 Deepwater Horizon rig workers.

Of the BP report, "which some people in the newspaper said was self-serving, we agree with about 90 percent of it," Bartlit said.

"There's a lot of extremely valuable work that was done there that cost BP a lot of money," he said. "We don't agree with everything. But it's a contribution to this hearing, and we're -- we thank you for doing it."

The leak occurred in the cement 18,360 feet below the gulf surface, he said.

"What happened occurred right down here, (at the) bottom of the well," he said. "This cement ... is where the leak occurred."

Bartlit said he wasn't reviewing the blowout preventer because the federal government contracted with a Norwegian engineering company to analyze it.

When introducing Bartlet, panel co-chairman William Reilly, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for former President George H.W. Bush, said the multi-day public hearing would be looking into details about what led to the blowout.

"One question I think we all have and have had from the beginning is to what extent this is just a unique set of circumstances unlikely to be repeated, or was it indicative of something larger," Reilly said. "In other disasters we find recurring themes of missed warning signals, information silos and complacency."

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., also a commission co-chairman, said, "We will learn for the next two days the many ways in which this complex system failed. We are not looking for scapegoats, but we do believe we have an obligation to uncover all relevant facts."