Tony Hayward has dug himself quite a hole, said Greg Bluestein in the Associated Press. Last week, the CEO of BP, whose drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico has been spewing millions of gallons of oil for more than a month, predicted that the environmental impact of the spill would be “very, very modest.” This week, after a walk along Louisiana’s Fourchon Beach, he admitted he was wrong. Pronouncing himself “devastated” by the damage he’d seen, he promised that BP would “clean every last drop up.”
Throughout this disaster, said Daniel Gross in Slate.com, “there’s been a sense that Hayward wasn’t quite prepared for this and didn’t grasp what was at stake.” He admitted that BP didn’t have the technology to stop the leak and “probably” should have been better prepared for an accident. And he reportedly asked his BP colleagues, “What the hell have we done to deserve this?” as if he and BP were the victims. At other times he went out of his way to minimize the extent of the spill, claiming, implausibly, that it was “tiny” in relation to the gulf’s total area. Asked if he felt that his job as CEO is in jeopardy, Hayward responded: “I don’t at the moment. That of course may change.” At least he got that right.
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