Norway's Petroleum Safety Authority ordered BP PLC to review its management systems for the second time in two years after concluding that serious safety breaches caused a North Sea leak that could have turned into a major accident.
Norway 's Petroleum Safety Authority ordered BP PLC to review its management systems for the second time in two years after concluding that serious safety breaches caused a North Sea leak that could have turned into a major accident.

Nobody was hurt in the Sept. 12 leak at the company's Ula field, but the PSA said a number of lives could have been lost in the accident, which involved the leak of 125 barrels of oil, 1,600 kilograms of gas and some extremely hot water, shutting down the Ula platform for more than two months.

The order of a safety review from Norway comes as BP just spent almost two months in a courtroom in New Orleans defending its safety record related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico , which killed 11 people and triggered the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The company is awaiting a judge's ruling.

The PSA gave BP until September to review its risk management, including why it failed to identify and address the weaknesses that led to the Ula leak. BP also has been asked to evaluate whether safety measures in response to a 2011 fire at the Valhall field in the North Sea were adequate.

Nobody was injured when a crane caught fire at Valhall, but it took over an hour to extinguish the blaze. PSA concluded that serious breaches of safety regulations had occurred.

"We have seen the letter from the PSA and have already closed some of these gaps," said BP spokesman Olav Fjellsa. BP is also looking deeper into whether it had taken the necessary steps to learn from the Valhall fire. "As a company, we take this seriously, and we want to learn from unwanted incidents," he said.

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