At the University of Mississippi’s 2024 IMC Connect! conference, students and faculty learned how to respond to a real-world crisis with former British Petroleum communications executives Lisa Houghton and Heidi Grether, who worked for the company during the Deepwater Horizon Oil Crisis.
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which was operated in part by BP and located around 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana, exploded on April 20, 2010. What followed this event was the largest accidental oil spill in history, resulting in 210 million gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and months of panicked cleanup. The spill affected nearly 70,000 square miles of ocean and took a massive toll on the coastlines of several states, including Mississippi.
Houghton was BP’s continental U.S. internal communications advisor at the time of the oil spill.
“87 days — that’s how long oil spilled, unabatedly, into the gulf,” Houghton said. “Over that time period, we tried many, many, many things to stop that oil, but it took until July 15 (2010) that they were able to actually cap it, and it was not considered dead until September when they were able to drill the intercept well.”
A member of the audience pointed out that BP’s response to the Deepwater Horizon accident is used in public relations textbooks as an example of what not to do in a crisis. The panelists responded that the situation was not black-and-white.
Houghton said that when she was first sent to the Mississippi coast to deal with the spill, her initial communications team was operating out of a camper and consisted of four other people who did not have a solid background in communications. She was also only told she would be there for two weeks, but ended up staying for the better part of four months.
“(My team) didn’t have deep community relations experience, but they showed up, and they started meeting with folks across the counties across the coast,” Houghton said. “That early response is non-stop, and there just wasn’t a lot of staff.”
Houghton highlighted the groundwork that the team ended up doing, like holding town meetings, meeting with local politicians and organizing community response as one of the most impactful parts of their response.
Grether worked alongside Houghton in similar efforts in Biloxi, Miss. Grether had retired from BP at the time of the spill, but when she saw the crisis that was about to ensue at her former place of work, she did not hesitate to offer her help. She returned as BP’s general manager for Mississippi external affairs,
“You are not planning to try and pull in your retirees and former workers,” Grethers said. “Nobody’s plan says that. But, nobody thinks about an event of this magnitude. It was bigger than anything anybody had ever drilled for or ever anticipated. So, on that Friday afternoon, I booked a car in Mississippi and I bought a plane ticket and by Sunday, I was in Mississippi.”
Grether said her job consisted of more than just communication.
“My role was more than just communication. It was trying to knit the pieces together. So you’ve got to identify who are your stakeholders, who matters … So for my period there, we ended up having to create programs to respond to the community, be able to answer the elected officials at the state and local level and provide information, and if you don’t know anything, say you don’t know,” Grether said.
Grether emphasized the importance of staying honest about the situation.
“You never know everything that’s going on in a crisis, because there’s always something somewhere, whether you’re reading it or involved in it, and so your best bet is to keep your mouth shut about things unless you really know what you’re talking about,” Grether said.
Grether ended the panel with a lesson she learned.
“It’s a lesson learned of, ‘Don’t say stupid things.’ But the other part of it was there was so much more than that. And it’s sad that some of what was said overshadows all of the work that was done by 48,000 people, ultimately,” said Grethers.
