BP’s Deepwater Horizon crisis is the case study I come back to most, because it failed twice. The crisis management failed: the plan on file couldn’t guide a real response, and the company’s early numbers were wrong. The crisis communications failed: BP’s executives made a human tragedy about themselves.
Either failure would have hurt. Together, they turned the worst offshore oil spill in US history into a reputational collapse that cost BP its CEO and tens of billions of dollars.
This Deepwater Horizon case study covers what happened, where BP’s disaster plan failed, where its communications failed, and what your crisis team should do differently.
What Happened
On the night of April 20, 2010, the Macondo well blew out beneath the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion and fire killed 11 workers. The rig sank two days later.
The well flowed for 87 days until it was capped on July 15, 2010. The federal government’s Flow Rate Technical Group estimated that about 4.9 million barrels of oil were released, of which about 800,000 barrels were captured at the wellhead. (For penalty purposes, a federal judge later set the figure at 3.19 million barrels.)
The National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling concluded that the blowout was preventable, the product of identifiable mistakes by BP and its contractors and a culture of complacency.
That is the operational disaster. The crisis that followed was BP’s own making.
Where BP’s Crisis Management Failed
The plan was written for compliance, not for use
BP’s regional spill response plan for the Gulf listed walruses, sea otters, and sea lions among the marine mammals at risk. None live in the Gulf of Mexico. The plan also named a wildlife expert who had died years before it was filed.
Those details became national news and the subject of congressional hearings. They told the public something worse than “BP made a typo.” They said BP’s plan was a document that nobody had read, let alone exercised.
Assume your plan will become public in a disaster. Write it so that you’d be comfortable if it did.
The numbers were wrong, and BP owned them
In the first weeks, the public estimate of the leak was 1,000 barrels a day, then 5,000. The government’s final estimate put the flow at up to 62,000 barrels a day at the start. The National Commission later reported that the 5,000 figure came from BP without supporting evidence.
Early numbers in a crisis are almost always wrong. That is normal. Presenting them as settled fact is the failure. Every time BP’s number moved, its credibility moved with it, in the wrong direction.
As our Anatomy of a Crisis piece puts it, early numbers change, so caveat everything you say in the first days: “Our current estimate is X. We expect it to change, and we’ll update you by Y.”
The response ran through the CEO
For the first two months, BP’s chief executive was the face, voice, and apparent decision-maker of the response. On June 18, BP’s chairman said Hayward was handing day-to-day operations of the spill response to managing director Bob Dudley. In late July, BP announced Dudley would replace Hayward as CEO effective October 1, 2010.
A crisis that runs through one executive runs at the speed of that executive, and fails with that executive’s worst moment. Effective crisis management separates the incident leader who runs the process from the executive who makes or confirms the big decisions. The executives and board section of our crisis management guide covers how to divide that work.
Before founding Bryghtpath, I spent time at Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative in 2011. One of the faculty had sat with leaders of the Deepwater Horizon response, and the question he kept asking in the lulls was simple: why did you just make that decision? That question is the discipline BP lacked. Decisions were being made, but no one was stepping back to ask whether they served the people affected.
Where BP’s Crisis Communications Failed
This is the part of the Deepwater Horizon story most people remember, and it is the part most avoidable.
It was about BP, not the people affected
On May 30, 2010, about six weeks into the spill, CEO Tony Hayward told reporters on the Louisiana coast: “There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.”
Eleven workers were dead. Fishermen, shrimpers, and coastal businesses were watching their livelihoods disappear. Hayward apologized within days, but the line became the defining quote of the crisis.
The first rule of crisis communications: it isn’t about you. Your stress, your schedule, and your company’s share price are not the story. The human element of a crisis is.
The words minimized the damage
In mid-May, Hayward described the spill as relatively tiny compared with a very big ocean, and told Sky News that its environmental impact would likely be “very, very modest.” Neither statement aged well.
On June 16, after meeting with President Obama, BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told reporters that BP cared about “the small people.” He was speaking in his second language and meant ordinary people. It didn’t matter. Know the language of the community you’re speaking to, and test your words against how they will hear them.
Three days later, Hayward attended a yacht race in England while oil was still flowing into the Gulf.
The advertising got ahead of the action
In early June, BP launched a national television campaign in which Hayward promised, “We will get this done. We will make this right.” Members of Congress criticized it as a $50 million image campaign, and BP later reported spending about $93 million on US advertising between April and the end of July.
The well was still leaking. Advertising that runs ahead of the action reads as spin, and it hands critics a dollar figure to compare against the cleanup. Match your communications to what you are actually doing, and let the action lead.
No single source of truth
Hayward, Svanberg, and other BP voices each made news on their own. When the chairman said on June 18 that Hayward was handing off the daily response, a BP spokesman said the same day that Hayward was “still very much in charge.” Estimates changed without explanation. The company never established a consistent, credible rhythm of updates that the public, the government, and its own employees could rely on.
A single source of truth, one situational update on a set cadence that every spokesperson works from, is what stops the swirl. It is how you get through the predictable pattern every crisis follows instead of re-igniting it. Our guide explains how a crisis unfolds and where that 48-hour turn sits.
The Cost
In 2015, BP agreed to a $20.8 billion civil settlement with the United States and the five Gulf states, the largest with a single entity in Justice Department history. It included a $5.5 billion Clean Water Act penalty and $8.1 billion for natural resource damages, with up to $700 million more for injuries not yet known.
BP’s CEO lost his job. The company’s name became shorthand for how not to handle a crisis. Sixteen years later, it still is.
Deepwater Horizon Lessons for Your Crisis Team
| Old View | New View |
| The response plan exists to satisfy the regulator | The response plan exists to be used, and you should assume it will be read in public |
| Give the public a number | Give the public your best estimate, label it as one, and say when you’ll update it |
| The CEO is the response | The crisis team runs the response; executives make the big calls and stay on message |
| Advertise the commitment | Act first; let communications describe what you’ve done |
| Share how hard this is on the company | Talk about the people affected, every time |
If you lead crisis management, crisis communications, or business continuity, here is what to do with this case:
- Read your own plan as a reporter would. Look for copied content, outdated contacts, and anything that would embarrass you on the front page. Fix it now.
- Write down who speaks and who decides. Name your spokespeople, the incident leader, and the decisions reserved for your executives and board.
- Build the single source of truth before you need it. A situational update template, a cadence, and a distribution list.
- Coach your executives on the first statement. The people affected come first. Never the company’s inconvenience. Rehearse it out loud.
- Exercise a slow-burn crisis, not just the first hour. BP’s worst moments came in weeks four through nine, when fatigue set in and executives were still talking.
Our crisis communications services help teams build exactly these pieces: the plan, the messaging, the spokesperson training, and the exercise that tests them.
BP had a plan. It didn’t have a plan anyone could use, or leaders who remembered who the crisis was about.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
- Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
- Build a response that holds up. Our Crisis Management services set up the team, plan, decision rights, and exercises your executives need.
- Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
- Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.
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