Denise Lenci
John Mullane
Calumet Communications Group
Houston
"I want my life back."
These are the words most often recalled when dozens of oil and gas executives were asked what they remembered about BP PLC's communications during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. They were spoken by then-Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward at a low point in the public's perception of how BP was handling the response. Hayward's words were meant to convey the strong commitment BP had to the remediation effort but instead came to be emblematic of an arrogant and uncaring corporation.
Did BP officials make a bad situation worse by the way they managed their communications? Or was the gulf spill an incident that was beyond public relations? In this article, we examine BP's communications effort and suggest considerations for future incidents.
Early responses
In the aftermath of the Macondo blowout on Apr. 20, BP launched one of the most sophisticated engineering responses in industry history. The leaking undersea wellhead was successfully capped in mid-July after 86 days of media scrutiny and public outrage. While the precise number of barrels discharged to the marine environment may be debated, the incident will be remembered as the largest oil spill in US history and will nudge the painful 1989 Exxon Valdez spill to a less prominent place in the memory of the US public.
BP avoided many of the conspicuous communications failures of the Exxon Valdez spill by promptly sending senior executives to the scene and providing regular updates on the response. BP apologized quickly and took responsibility for the cleanup. In advertisements and press conferences, its representatives made contrite, even bold statements: "The gulf oil spill is a tragedy that never should have happened"; "We take full responsibility for the cleanup"; "We are committed to making this right."
BP seemed to be organizing a comprehensive and responsive public information effort to parallel the remediation effort. To support the public's demand for information, BP brought in employees from all over the country and engaged a number of consulting agencies to fill a range of needs: from media relations and government relations to community relations, advertising, online communications, and more.
Credibility gap
After a dramatic explosion and fire, the Deepwater Horizon disappeared after 2 days, leaving a fiery sea and an ominous black plume of smoke to mark the spot.
Initially, US Coast Guard Rear Adm. and Deputy On-Scene Commander Mary Landry said there was no oil leaking from the Macondo well. Days later she acknowledged there was oil in the water, but it was just "seepage." Days later, a leak was confirmed, and Landry and BP estimated the rate at "1,000 b/d."
Estimates climbed to 5,000 b/d and then 20,000 b/d by May 20. The rate would climb again to 30,000 b/d and then finally to 40,000-60,000 b/d. Media stories about the increased discharge estimates were accompanied by speculation that BP was trying to hide the facts.
Early failures to cap the well with "top hats" and "junk shots" fueled the public anxiety.
During this same period, Hayward suggested that the spill would not be a major issue because the Gulf of Mexico is "a very big ocean." He told interviewers that the spill was "relatively tiny" and that the impact was likely going to be "very, very modest." While events eventually seemed to have proven him more right than wrong, at the time they were made they were seen as a clumsy effort to minimize the concerns and the damage. A New York Times article criticized Hayward for playing down the significance of the spill and projecting "a tone of unrelenting optimism despite repeated failures to plug the well."
On May 10, at a Senate Energy Committee hearing, executives from BP and its contractors on the Macondo project, Halliburton Co. and Transocean Ltd., all pointed to each other as primarily responsible for the accident.
By the end of May—when Hayward made his "I want my life back" remark on a Venice, La., pier—BP's credibility had hit bottom. The public rage was palpable, and the political winds were at hurricane force. The atmosphere was filled with an eerie sense that nothing was being done and that no one was in charge. A Natural Resources Defense Council senior lawyer charged, "The government is letting BP clean up their own crime scene."
What had started out as an open and responsive communications approach began to look more like an effort to control and shape the news.
Lessons learned:
• Especially in the early days of an incident response, company spokespeople must be factually accurate and circumspect in their commentary.
• Speculation of any type—about causes, who is responsible, amounts spilled, and potential impacts—is inappropriate.
• Communications should stay focused on details of the response effort.
Separate communications
Weeks into the incident, one headline asked: "Who's in charge? BP or Admiral Thad Allen?" Confused facts, lack of progress, and public confusion about who was "in charge" of the cleanup and questions about "why wasn't the government doing more?" led to a symbolic breakup of the unified team. On June 1, the 41st day after the accident, it was announced that Thad Allen, the national incident commander (NIC), would begin daily press briefings without BP.
"In order to ensure delivery of the timeliest and most accurate information to the public…NIC Admiral Thad Allen will begin holding a daily press briefing. The daily briefings will supersede the current schedule of daily joint briefings with BP from the Joint Information Center (JIC) in Robert, La.," stated a government news release.
The Unified Area Command was still intact and functioning as an integrated team. The splitting off from the JIC was largely a symbolic break designed to reassure the public that the government really was involved and in charge. In reality, BP continued to be the key player in the response and in the Unified Command Centers.
Allen, as national incident commander, was the senior official in charge from the beginning with the authority to federalize the response if he determined that BP was failing. He never seemed to waiver in his support of the BP team. He noted that the industry had "the engineering and the equipment" and cited the continued need for "unity of effort" and the Unified Command as the "single most important thing" to shuttering the Macondo. He described BP's response as "relentless—and we have been relentless in our oversight."
With Allen as spokesperson, the oil spill had an authoritative speaker with a command of the facts. He exuded integrity, intelligence, and commitment. Allen was the reassuring spokesperson, the steady hand that the public needed to see. He consistently refused to put numbers on the flow rate or predict the final plugging of the Macondo. "It won't be done until the relief well is complete." Allen could stand up to the media demands and correct media inaccuracies.
Lessons learned:
• BP and the unnerved public may have been better served if the government had taken a more conspicuous role in the joint information process from the outset. Having the "responsible party" taking the lead is a difficult concept for the public to grasp.
• The public needs to have a genuine understanding that there is a team at work and that the appropriate authorities are providing oversight.
Diversifying information
BP had an impressive brain trust of engineering and technical talent inside one of the most sophisticated crisis centers in the world at its Westlake-4 Houston headquarters: "Mission Control." Highly regarded technical consultants and key people from ExxonMobil and Shell worked side-by-side through 12-hr shifts and 7-day work weeks. By mid-June, almost 2 months after the Macondo blowout, BP began to invite media representatives into the center and surface some of their technical staff as spokespeople.
Kent Wells, incident commander and senior vice-president in charge of the underwater containment effort at Mission Control, gave briefings and appeared in videos explaining the complexity of the underwater challenges. These were among the strongest of many videos BP offered on its web site.
BP began to bring more news people to the offshore Macondo wellsite. It made the lead engineer on the relief well, John Wright, available for interviews. The Houston Chronicle made a page-one feature story out of Wright: "The Quiet Assassin." Accompanied by a dramatic photo from the scene of the drilling, the article described Wright as "an unassuming Aggie from Houston…who must hit a 7-in. bull's-eye under a mile of water and 2 miles of rock, using a drillbit not much bigger than his two fists."
Also in June, there was a change in the underwater live camera coverage of the spill site. Instead of one murky view of crude oil gushing from a single pipe shown continuously on the news, BP made available all 12 views from the ocean floor. Now the public could watch the underwater battle to bring the leak to heel. Deepwater vessels (Poseidon, Viking, Enterprise, and Rover) could be seen wielding saws, ropes, wrenches, and diamond tipped-chain saws. When a saw got stuck, a submersible wielding a pair of shears that looked like a giant garden tool came to the rescue. The Christian Science Monitor described it as a "remote-controlled lumberjack."
The footage dramatically showed what Allen had described weeks earlier: "We are trying to find…ways to do things that have never been done before."
The underwater horror movie had become an underwater adventure. The expanded views yielded far greater understanding of the complexity of the challenge.
Lessons learned:
• In a large incident, a range of spokespeople, including engineers and other on-the-ground experts, can help feed the public need for factual information and reassurance that the response is being handled appropriately.
• Providing media access to command centers, work sites, and video and other materials can build trust and enhance public understanding of an incident response.
Telling or spinning?
BP undertook an impressive television and print advertising campaign and made extensive use of online and social media. This approach provided BP with direct and immediate access to a huge swath of the general public.
The television and print advertising had well-written, sharply focused copy. Initially the ads were straightforward messages from BP's top management, but by mid-May the advertising began to feature BP employees working to clean the beaches, pay claims, save wildlife, and more. The BP spokespeople were employees who lived and worked in Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states.
When news reports and public-relations pundits criticized the $100 million expenditures on advertising, BP tweaked its ad copy to note that it was meeting its commitment to communicate with people about what was happening in their areas.
BP also provided extensive information on a web site devoted to the incident response called "Gulf of Mexico response." The site was easy to understand and informative, including updates on the response, claims information, pictures, videos, BP contacts, and more. Visitors to the site could sign up to receive e-mail newsletters, and BP extended its online reach by placing, and continually updating, content on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Youtube.
The impression given was of an inside, transparent view of BP's battle to stop the spill. It was all there: space-age command centers, live fast-moving conferences, interviews with commanders tasked with making big decisions, large groups in motion and at work.
However, BP tainted the even-handedness of its public information effort to some degree by over-producing the information and materials it released. Some examples:
• Photos on BP's web site showed mostly clean workers, unsullied beaches, and unaffected wildlife—depicting a view of the spill's impact more positive than media images.
• A blogger discovered that several photos on the site were electronically altered to depict several aspects of the response effort. BP confirmed that the pictures were touched up but did not explain why.
• The company purchased search terms, including "oil spill," on Google and other search engines to insure that its web site would receive prominent placement in a search. BP explained that this was an attempt to make it easier for people to find information about the spill. But it was criticized for trying to crowd out news media sources.
• BP sent regular e-mail news updates to people who registered. The idea was good, but the updates were not well-written. They were overly technical and consistently behind the media reports. Some of the syntax was tortured—for example, repetitively referring to the Macondo well as "MC252." No one else used that term.
A blogger on Wired.com suggested that BP's social media effort "may make matters worse, by instead feeding a meme that BP is tone-deaf—more concerned with polishing its reputation than cleaning up its mess."
Lessons learned:
• Direct communication with the public is critical in a large incident response. Advertising, web sites, e-mail, and social media are important tools with which to make this connection.
• If communications look too polished, they probably are.
• All communications should focus on providing factual information without interpretation or "spin."
Emergency response planning
BP was faced with an extraordinary set of circumstances in the Macondo well blowout and subsequent oil spill. Confronting the potential for environmental catastrophe, BP mounted the largest and most sophisticated spill responses ever. Its public information effort, likewise, was unprecedented. There were many things BP got right and some missteps that may only have exacerbated the company's terribly difficult situation.
It is instructive for oil and gas companies to examine what went wrong and incorporate those lessons into emergency response plans (ERPs). In many cases, ERPs provide just an outline of the public information function during an incident. We think this is a mistake. Oil and gas companies conduct numerous drills to make sure they are ready to respond to an incident. These drills need to reflect the real world and include a media-and-communications team that is integrated into the response or unified command structure.
Are your response teams ready to manage the communications requirements that accompany an incident of national significance? Who are your spokespeople? Do you know who are best suited to the task? Are they prepared for media interviews? How will your staff at an incident site respond if approached by a reporter? Who are the communications officers at emergency response agencies? How will you coordinate with them? What tools will you use to communicate and with whom?
These and many other questions should be answered and drilled long before an incident occurs.
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