THE BOARD OF BP meets tomorrow to discuss the firm’s second-quarter results – but is expected to spend most of its meeting debating whether to retain Tony Hayward as chief executive.
A source close to the board told Reuters the meeting would focus “on the timing of Hayward’s departure, rather than whether or not he would stay with the company.”
Hayward has become the public figure for BP’s error-prone efforts to repair the damage caused by the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig killed eleven and kickstarted a 13-week leak into the Gulf of Mexico.
Having essentially plugged the rupture in the underground Maconda oil well, BP this week begins its efforts to repair the environmental damage caused by the spill.
Initial efforts to address the environmental disaster – described as the worst in the country’s history – and to permanently seal the leak were held up by the presence of Tropical Storm Bonnie, which has since moved away to the Mexican coast.
The size of fleet – which comprises 5,600 vessels, making the fleet the largest assembled since the Allied landings on Normandy – has sparked concerns that the size of the effort will itself cause more harm than good.
An administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency conceded that “absolutely nothing you do to respond to an oil spill is without impacts of its own,” while a fisheries scientist from the Louisiana State University said one craft, the ‘A Whale’ which sucks up 20 million gallons of water a day, and filters out the oil – “will suck in a lot of biology.”
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