Former BP CEO says company’s oil spill response was ‘inadequate’

You can file this one under "things you probably already knew."

In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, former BP CEO Tony Hayward was remarkably candid: "BP's contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day to day."

At the same time, though, Hayward takes issue with the notion that the oil giant was engaged in a big effort to crack down on press access to sites affected by the spill. Instead, he claims, BP was simply not ready for prime time when it came to dealing with the media.

"We tried to be open and transparent, we gave access to the operation, but the reality is we were completely overrun and just not prepared to deal with the intensity of the media scrutiny," Hayward said. "What was going on was some extraordinary engineering. But when it was played out in the full glare of the media as it was, of course it looked like fumbling and incompetence."

Hayward also said that he fully understood the anger that the White House and the American people harbored toward him and BP -- "the emotion and anger and frustration was entirely understandable, actually," he said -- but that the public backlash against his company still got under his skin. His frustration reached its apex, he recalls, when he got lambasted in the press for returning home to England at the height of the spill for a yachting getaway.

"I have to confess, at the time I was pretty angry, actually. I hadn't seen my son for three months. I was on the boat for six hours. ... I'm not certain I'd do anything different," he said.

Hayward also suggested that he would have been better served by training in the dramatic arts than in engineering when it came to his public handling of the spill crisis. "I may have done better, but I'm not certain it would've changed the outcome," Hayward said. "But certainly the perception of myself may have been different."

(Photo of Hayward: AP/Patrick Semansky)