Like most people, I have favorites. My favorite kind of food is Southwestern/Tex-Mex and my favorite band is Led Zeppelin. My favorite football team...well, that’s easy: the world champion Saints. (Who Dat!!) If you’d asked me what my favorite oil company was on April 19th, I’d have said BP, almost without a doubt. (“Favorite oil company,” however, rarely makes my favorites list.) BP has recently been a solid sponsor of my favorite ice sculpting event, the World Ice Art Championships, and I’d essentially bought into their message that they were making an effort to move “beyond petroleum” and channelling money into renewable energy.

    Beginning on April 20th, however, BP started to slip from my favorites list. That day, of course, was the day that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico and was Day One of the BP Oil Crisis. In the explosion and fire on the rig, 11 people died, and that was bad enough. But it at least seemed that that was as bad as it was going to get; by all accounts, even after the rig sank to the ocean floor about a mile below, there was no oil leaking from the well that the rig had been drilling.

    With the early news reports reassuring us that no oil was being released, I recall feeling a bit relieved. In hindsight, it reminds me of another day, nearly five years earlier, that I’d felt a similar sense of relief. On August 29, 2005, we thought that New Orleans had lucked out as monstrous Hurricane Katrina turned slightly to the east just before landfall. I remember watching round-the-clock news coverage in a hotel room almost 400 miles from my adopted city, and we were ecstatic about the last second turn. While knowing and fearing that it was very bad news for coastal Mississippi, we thought that the Big Easy’s flood protection could certainly handle the weaker left side of the storm and winds that turned out to be barely Category 2 strength (instead of the worst case Category 4 or 5 winds).

    In both cases, that sense of relief was short lived. Just as the floodwaters slowly rose in New Orleans and we found out that the levees had failed and couldn’t be plugged, we found out that there was a hole at the bottom of the Gulf that was gushing black oil. As the weeks wore on, we found that this hole couldn’t be plugged either and that it was a much bigger hole than anyone had thought!

    Oil gushed into the Gulf for 86 days until finally on July 15th, after several failed attempts, BP was thankfully able to get the flow of oil under control. During those 86 days, likely well over 100 million gallons of crude oil leaked into the Gulf, causing massive and still uncalculated environmental and economic damage to the region.

    Just as the oil had slowly wreaked its destruction on the Gulf, BP had seemed equally intent on destroying their own public image. Their former CEO, Tony Hayward, took an ill-advised sailing vacation in the midst of the crisis and mused that he “would like [his] life back,” at that moment perhaps oblivious to the degree that his company’s mistakes had forever changed the lives of many Gulf Coast residents. Meanwhile, BP engineers had been obviously lowballing the flow rate of the oil and cleanup efforts had been suffering a myriad of troubles, not least of which that they’d been managing to cook endangered sea turtles in the surface oil burn offs! Whenever BP had prepared to make a new attempt to plug the well, they’d always cautioned that nothing of this sort had ever been attempted at these depths (about 5000 feet) before. The unspoken implication of these warnings was that they’d never bothered to prepare for this sort of emergency at depth and really didn’t know what they were doing.

   To be fair, not all of BP’s apparent missteps were completely their own doing. One BP official had supposedly claimed that “Louisiana isn’t the only place that has shrimp.” Out of context, this line seemed to represent the pinnacle of the company’s insensitivity to the plight of Louisiana’s seafood industry and implied that consumers should simply look elsewhere for their seafood needs. The official, Randy Prescott, was besieged with nasty phone calls and emails after his email address and phone number were posted all over the web. Prescott admitted that he did in fact make that statement in response to a question in front of an audience and that he could have chosen his wording more carefully. In context, it turned out that he was merely pointing out that Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida also had shrimp and seafood industries that were threatened.

BP brought in a blimp to help them survey the oil on the coast and in the water. To no one’s surprise, BP didn’t put a logo on their blimp, a la Goodyear.
This was probably a wise move in a somewhat disgruntled state with a high percentage of gun ownership.
(In this photo, the blimp is docked at an airport in Mobile, AL.)

    As a Gulf Coast resident, the whole oil spill responsibility situation struck me as sort of odd. Clearly, BP deserved a good chunk of the blame for the disaster and some credit goes to them for stepping up and promising to make things right again. But the analogy that I came up with for the situation was this: It’s like if a drunk driver had caused a major accident and then was put in charge of getting the victims to the hospital. Sure, the cops would follow along behind, but the drunk has to get them there because he was responsible for the accident. (In this case, the Coast Guard was playing the cops role.) It would have made more sense to me if BP had just been put in charge of capping the well, which obviously was giving them quite a bit of trouble and was a pretty big job by itself. Other concerns, like keeping oil off the coast and cleaning up the soiled beaches and marshes, should have been handled by other, less distracted parties. BP should just be the one footing the bill. After all, BP probably knows more than most about capping a well (although it was hard to tell for a while), but what do they know about looking out for affected coastlines? If you looked at their submitted emergency plans (which had been copied from northern contingency plans), they were worried about the effects that a spill would have on all the walruses and seals in the Gulf! (Not a big concern, since there aren’t any!)

    While the oil was flowing, anti-BP sentiment along the Gulf Coast was rampant. Radio and newspapers along the coast were constantly covering every development while they were trying to cap the well. For my part, I can’t say that I’ve been to a BP gas station in quite awhile and the one that I frequented before the disaster has recently changed its branding to a Shell station, which I suspect is not a coincidence. But I don’t live right on the water and I never actually saw any oil. However, I did see a lot of boom deployed (to control incoming oil) during my frequent drives along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. Signs of the crisis were pretty hard to miss for a while even though I never saw any of the direct effects of the disaster. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with seafood out of the Gulf. Anything that goes out to consumers is checked very thoroughly and I eat it as often as I can!

For a while, during the main part of the crisis, the angry little fellow above was my Facebook profile pic.

    Much of the ongoing damage to BP’s public image (and stock price) stopped as soon as they shut off the oil. The anti-BP sentiment in the region has cooled somewhat too, now that we’re in a cleanup-only phase and BP hasn’t tried to sneak out of town in the middle of the night. More good news came a couple days ago when the Feds ended the drilling moratorium in the Gulf. (The moratorium meant that not only was the Gulf’s fishing industry damaged, but that the oil industry was too, which is another major industry in the region. This was a double whammy for jobs along Louisiana’s coast.) New safeguards will hopefully make the possibility of another crisis much less likely.

    Back in early 2005, a little more than six months before Katrina, I did a couple of BP logo ice sculptures for a Gulf Coast casino; I’d think it unlikely that I’ll be making any more BP sculptures any time soon. Obviously, the disaster’s effects go far beyond costing me a few ice sculpture sales, but it will be difficult for me to quantify the exact effect that the disaster has had on my business. Because it’s been a major economic event, however, it surely has had some. Those that were at the Memphis ice carving tradeshow on 9/11 will remember not only the trouble they had getting home, but also the devastating, but fortunately short-term effect that that crisis had on their ice sculpture businesses. Not only did all sorts of businesses temporarily grind to a halt, but nobody felt much like having a party! Much more recently, the recession has put a lot of pressure on ice sculptors. As a much longer term crisis, the recession has had some sculptors questioning their future in the business and I know of at least two ice sculpture businesses that recently closed. As a perceived extravagance, the ice sculpting industry sits atop a number of other foundation industries such as travel, entertainment, hospitality, and conventions, not to mention the business climate as a whole. As these foundation supports are kicked out or at least compromised by various natural and manmade disasters and crises, the ice sculpting industry suffers accordingly.

    Not all of the effects of a disaster like the BP event are indirect and hard for ice sculptors to quantify. And I’m not even talking about the obvious stuff like rising gas prices. Like the Nashville floods, a seemingly unrelated disaster can have a direct effect on the world of ice sculpture. Because BP has over the last several years been a major sponsor of the World Ice Art Championships, there was for while a question as to whether that would continue. (For a while also, there were a lot questioning whether or not BP would be able to continue as a company at all!) BP’s departure as the title sponsor could pose a significant problem for the event, especially since Ice Alaska has for some time been involved in a dispute with their landlord, which has recently come to a head. But according to Dick Brickley, head of Ice Alaska, BP has recently agreed to return as title sponsor of the World Ice Art Championships in 2011. Surely BP is looking for all the good press they can get nowadays, so it makes sense as long as there’s enough money available.

    I always look forward to the Ice Art Championships and plan to go again in 2011, but I have mixed feelings now that I know BP will return as a sponsor. While the oil was flowing, I would have had a major problem participating in any event that BP was connected to. As the cleanup progresses, I feel a little better about the situation, but it’s still tough to forget BP’s obvious incompetence in the early days of the crisis. Also, there will be a lot of uncertainty along the Gulf for some time as the long term effects of the disaster are determined. If BP continues its apparent efforts to do the right thing, then maybe someday all that BP anti-sentiment will morph into something resembling favorable opinions. For me, if BP took on a leading role in the efforts to move “beyond petroleum” and start getting us off this dangerous addiction to oil, it would make all the difference. Just don’t expect to catch me filling up at a BP station for a while, at least until they’ve made some real progress.