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‘They Were Ready...’
BP ’s Orange County Spill Response Remains The Industry Standard For Public Crisis Management

By Richard S. Levick

In our business — the business of media relations and crisis management — certain historic occasions have set the standard for how corporate giants ought to be communicating with the public in the direct aftermath of a disaster. Traditionally, Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol tampering crisis is cited as the best of best practices.

Of course, Johnson & Johnson had an advantage in terms of public perception. It wasn’t the company that caused the problem. It was some psychopath.

Corporations face greater challenges in the court of public opinion when they are the parties that clearly caused the bad event. The ideal nominee for best practices in crisis communications would therefore be a company that, as part of its crisis response initiative, shouldered the burden of responsibility and did so honestly, yet without exposing itself to additional endless liability.

It should come as no surprise that an environmental disaster provides the context for such a challenge, and that an oil company — one of those corporate behemoths that large percentages of the public love to hate — is really the best nominee for First Prize in media and public relations, especially as it even snatched public admiration from the jaws of opprobrium.

I nominate BP Petroleum for its handling of the February 1990 oil spill off Orange County, California.

And I do so, not so much as an exercise in retrospection, but as a case that provides ongoing lessons for any corporation embroiled in an environmental problem.

Gathering Storm

In early 1990, many thousands of gallons of BP oil spilled in the Pacific, washing slicks up along a four-mile coastline that included Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. For the public at large, the main reference point was still Exxon Valdez. The mishandling of that disaster created an enduring expectation that whoever was responsible would not be forthcoming, that there would be no coherent accountability, and that corporate messages in the aftermath of the spill would be unclear if not contradictory.

Exxon did a lot of things right in how it managed the cleanup. It was the press relations that they booted, and as a result they were perceived as trying to avoid liability for the spill versus taking responsibility for the clean up.

BP faced a variety of challenges, some rather subtle. Orange County is a corporate center and a Republican stronghold, populated by the very folks who normally leap to an oil company’s defense in times of trouble. Now, however, these citizens were the victims. Conceivably, BP could have been left without a lot of natural allies.

Other dangers were more obvious. First, BP is a foreign company. Even the (then) Cleveland-based spokespersons for British Petroleum America spoke with British accents. Xenophobia runs as a sub-text through media coverage in most countries and the US is no exception. The villains in this story could have been awfully easy to cast.

Second, if potential allies were jeopardized, the predictable foes of the oil companies were galvanized. As soon as the story broke, the beaches were crawling with Democratic politicians. One after another, they held press conferences, demanding justice, on the darkened shores of Orange County.

Finally, a bit of happenstance exacerbated the situation. The oil spill occurred just before the California legislature was to decide on a proposed “Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act” that would have meant a $25 million fine. The timing could have made the company look maddeningly lucky. It was polluting California just under the wire, without having to pay the penalty that Sacramento officials clearly wanted it to pay.

Changing The Story

But BP’s communications team had an advantage that their counterparts at Exxon apparently did not have. They had something to communicate: BP was, in fact, committed to do whatever it took, and spend whatever was needed, to rectify the situation. The commitment was genuine, total, and resolute. The best PR always starts with strength.

Even so, the potential adversity faced by BP was serious enough to have buried the company’s best intentions in a swelter of accusations, political opportunism, and knee-jerk media hostility. Corporate good citizenship is never enough. There must be systems in place to market the good citizenship.

Toward that end, BP had a crisis team in place before the oil spill occurred. The company also had a crisis plan to draw on, written in 1989. Clearly, the creation of that plan had been an immediate response to Exxon Valdez. It was a conscious corporate resolution, one year before it was needed, that the communications mistakes made by Exxon would not be made again by BP Petroleum.

BP’s team was wired. As soon as the spill occurred, team members in London and Cleveland began a constant dialogue via teleconference to plot each next step. The transatlantic team fed company representatives at the epicenter of the crisis in Long Beach, California. As a result of this 24/7 efficiency, corporate spokespersons were able to deliver multiple updates to the media. The media never had to wonder if or how they could get a statement or new information from the company.

The more efficient the communications process, the more strategic the content. The kind of response planning that occurred as ideas flowed freely between London and Cleveland simply increased the likelihood that an overall media strategy — not just a series of “holding statements” — would emerge.

In this regard, BP’s communications professionals could exploit another advantage. The evolving corporate strategy seized on implicit media interest in a new story line — not the familiar one of evil oil companies callously besmirching the landscape, but a much happier one about what can and ought to happen in the wake of a major spill. The media was open to that pitch and BP knew it.

In other words, there was real potential for a communications coup, an utter transformation of a negative news day into a positive one.

On his nightly national report, Peter Jennings sounded what turned out to be the theme that would dominate the story going forward. After stating that there has been tremendous pressure on oil companies to be prepared in the event of another spill, Jennings exclaimed, “This time, they were ready.”

Selling The Story

To convince Peter Jennings and others like him that the company was indeed “ready,” BP implemented its crisis plan superbly. In addition to the immediate updates from corporate spokespersons, James Ross, CEO of British Petroleum America, and John McDonald, President of British Petroleum, were both immediately deployed to speak for the company. Their accessibility powerfully confirmed BP’s sincerity and concern.

Judging by their on-air performances, we’d guess that both men had been media-trained to craft the best messages and to deliver them as sympathetically as possible. Ross, for one, began by expressing regret, without any attempt to avoid responsibility. “Everything that can be done is being done,” he said, a simple but credible reassurance.

McDonald appeared on Today with Mike Murphy, President of the American Trading & Transportation Company, which owned the tanker. Today asked pointblank if they were accepting responsibility and if they would pay for the clean-up. Their answer was an unequivocal “yes” — although there was some ambiguity in how the costs might be shared by the two companies.

It was only a minor glitch. More important, the public was seeing both men together. They could see that the two men were obviously colleagues. They were obviously working in unity. They even seemed to like each other.

At one point during the interview, McDonald offered a small sound byte that effectively underscored BP’s whole intended agenda for corporate responsibility. In confirming that BP would take full charge, McDonald simply said, “It is our oil.” The best sound bytes are sometimes the smallest, brevity being the proverbial soul of wit.

McDonald masterfully handled a direct question about the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act. Asked what effect the spill would have on that legislation, McDonald said, “I really don’t know how to answer that.” He acknowledged that the crisis might hasten passage, but he did not come close to offering his opinion on the merits of the legislation. He simply said that, in this case, “an effective response has been mounted.”

BP’s efforts were supported by impressive third-party endorsements. Even as Ross and McDonald were assuring the public that everything humanly possible was being done, a senior uniformed military officer confirmed on air that BP had made a commitment to full operational and cost responsibility. “You don’t often have that in a spill,” he concluded.

Coup De Grace

At the end of the day, however, BP’s public vindication was assured because — not only did it change the story and convince the media that its version was the right one — it also helped the media tell the story.

BP understood that messages are most profoundly and indelibly conveyed by visuals, more so than by sound bytes. The media may have believed that BP was doing the right thing, but the media also had access to video clips that made it easier for them to run an entertaining story for their viewers as well as an exculpatory one for BP.

BP employees were filmed as they scoured oil off rocks on the beaches. It was a fascinating, other-worldly picture of men at work. It was also reassuring to the public because it showed that the rocks were being cleaned. A voice-over informed the audience that more than 100 cleaning crews were engaged in this work. There were altogether 3,000 workers engaged in the clean-up.

As a result, the clean-up, not the spill, became the real story.

Even better, the reopening of the beaches made for additionally positive TV coverage later on. Sunny visuals replete with summer beach activities completed the public’s perception of BP Petroleum — and of how the company, far from de-spoiling the terrain, had brought joy to Southern California.

In a decisive TV spot, Phil Donahue — widely perceived as a liberal with no particular love for oil companies — stood on Huntington Beach and announced that, two weeks after the spill, it was looking “pretty good.”

Donahue then delivered the one message that the oil industry would have scripted for him. It is the one message above all others that the industry has been anxious to disseminate since Exxon Valdez.

The real story here, said Donahue, is that “an oil spill need not be the end of the world.”

Richard S. Levick, Esq., rlevick@levick.com is president of Levick Strategic Communications, which has handled the media for numerous environmental cases and controversies, as well as diverse other high-profile matters, from Napster and the Florida election recount to the Catholic Church controversy and the Rosie O’Donnell Rosie magazine lawsuit. Their new book, Stop the Presses: The Litigation PR Desk Reference, is available on amazon.com. Replies are welcome. Copyright 2004 by the author.