The initials BP are by now a household word. It is a name that in the public mind at least has become synonymous with longtime legal, environmental, and safety issues. The story starts two days after Christmas in 1965, when the oil rig Sea Gem collapsed and killed 13 crew members in the icy waters of the North Sea. Then came 40 years of toxic waste dumping, and oil and gas price manipulations, followed by the disastrous Texas City oil refinery blast of 2005 that left 15 workers dead and 270 injured.
The federal government ordered the company to fix some 300 safety problems at the refinery. BP paid a record $21 million fine and hired a new chief executive who vowed to make safety his top priority. But in 2009 the government cited BP again for failing to repair more than 200 of those violations and imposed another record fine. Then, last April, faulty equipment at the refinery allowed thousands of pounds of cancer-causing chemicals to leak into the air for 40 days. Worse, no one told residents in the surrounding communities—or even BP’s own workers—that they were breathing toxic air.
