The Gulf oil spill is notably the worst oil spill in United States history. Within days of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and sinking in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people, underwater cameras revealed that the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about forty-two miles off the coast of Louisiana (The Ocean Portal Team, 2010). The well discharged oil into the Gulf of Mexico for eighty-seven days until the attempt to cement the well shut was successful, but at that point the damage was already done and an estimated 3.19 million barrels of oil was released into the Gulf contaminating the waters and surrounding shorelines (The Ocean Portal Team, …show more content…
BP has undergone sixty-three reported incidents of misconduct since 1995 (Sheppard, 2013). These prior health and safety violations resulted in an explosion in a Texas refinery in 2005 and a fire at an Ohio refinery in 2006. These instances killed thirty people and injured over 200 others. During the three years from 2007 to 2010, BP’s health and safety violations made up ninety-seven percent of the "egregious, willful" violations issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) (Thomas, Cloherty, & Ryan,