LONDON – BP PLC chief executive Tony Hayward said yesterday he won’t step down over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and predicted his company would recover from the disaster.
Hayward told BBC television’s Andrew Marr Show that he would not quit, and he had the “absolute intention of seeing this through to the end”.
“We are going to stop the leak. We’re going to clean up the oil, we’re going to remediate any environmental damage and we are going to return the Gulf Coast to the position it was in prior to this event,” Hayward said. “That’s an absolute commitment, we will be there long after the media has gone, making good on our promises.”
The executive said a containment cap placed on the blown-out well in the Gulf had collected about 10 000 barrels of oil over the last 24 hours, and that BP hoped a second containment system would be in place by next weekend.
“When those two are in place, we would very much hope to be containing the vast majority of the oil,” Hayward said. He added that the new containment operation was designed to “be essentially hurricane proof”.
Hayward said the spill was a one-in-100 000 to a one-in-a-million occurrence. “In this accident, based on what we understand so far, seven layers of protection were breached,” he told the BBC.
But he rejected claims that the incident showed oil companies were now operating beyond their technical capacity.
“That’s of course a very valid concern,” he said. “It’s also worth just highlighting the industry has been exploring in the deep water for over 20 years and it has not had to contend with an incident of this sort before.” (AP)
