BP exec uses Wikipedia to check Deepwater Horizon stats
In a story that seems too ridiculous to be true, a senior BP executive is alleged to have looked up the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on that trusted source, Wikipedia, rather than ask experts.
The source of this incredible claim isn’t The Onion or even The Daily Mash; it is in fact Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, which wrote:
According to allegations filed in a Louisiana court Thursday, [BP executive David] Rainey used information gleaned from the online encyclopedia to estimate that the Deepwater rig was leaking 5,000 barrels of oil a day. And he stuck to that figure, defending his calculation vigorously in public and before the US Congress despite calls from many others, including some BP engineers, that it was far too low. “We should be very cautious standing behind a 5,000 [barrels of oil per day (BOPD)] figure as our modelling shows that this well could be making anything up to 100,000 BOPD,” one company engineer wrote in an internal e-mail to top executives on May 14, 2010, also part of the filings released Thursday.
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