You’d think that someone whose job is on the line might choose his language more carefully.

Tony Hayward, the beleaguered chief executive of oil giant BP, has claimed the company’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is “relatively tiny” compared with the “very big ocean”.

However, earlier this week he sounded less sanguine when he admitted that the leak is being fought on three fronts: beneath the surface, on the surface and on the shore. At the “subsea” level, he said, this was the first time the industry had had to deal with any problems at this depth, and that there was a lot of “real-time learning going on”.

Hayward promised yesterday that BP would “fix” the disaster, which is on course to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident as the biggest US oil spill in history. “The only question is we do not know when,” he said. That indicates little progress from last week, when he was unable to give a timescale for when the flow of oil would be stemmed. Nonetheless, he confidently declared on the Thursday before last that BP would “bounce back” from the setback.

This week he insisted that deep-water drilling would continue in the US despite the growing environmental and political backlash, and came up with this memorable analogy: “Apollo 13 [the unsuccessful third mission to the moon in 1970] did not stop the space race.”

Initially BP tried to palm off all responsibility on to Transocean, which owns the rig on which the blow-out happened, but Hayward conceded at the beginning of last week that BP was “absolutely responsible” for the oil spill.

Source: The Guardian