Tucked away on page 4 of today’s Financial Times is a story by Ed Crooks and Harvey Morris called “High level tensions behind the clean-up effort”. Its a most marvelous narrative both in its depiction of process and content in organizational cooperation.

The context is familiar: the American populace, desirous of continuing our oil addiction, has tasked the Federal Government (Congress and the White House) with exploiting all possible natural resources; the Feds, in turn, have tasked BP as their agent for drilling for oil beyond the limits of imagination, deep in the Gulf of Mexico. BP, of course, together with its subcontractors, dropped the ball. As the oil-producing agents of the American voter, BP is to be blamed as the party of last resort.

Washington, looking at its credibility in light of upcoming elections, is the cheerleader of blame: as a tragic, hideous, and environmentally disastrous scenario, participated in by consumers, government, and industry, unfolds.

Enter Mr Crooks and Mr Morris. They document the vicissitudes of collaborative and integrated effort between BP and the Federal Government in addressing a situation that neither have the equipment or expertise to control: the blown out well.

While pointing out the new difficulties in this relationship, attendant upon the political pressures felt by Federal actors— such as complicating an already complex integration of 3 Louisiana and 1 Texas response bases with another in Florida— or the Coast Guard’s new demand for a paper trail of communication rather than telephone communication with BP— Crooks and Morris also contextualize the enormous cooperation between the players in this strategic alliance of government and corporation.

They document the continuous contact between Tony Hayward, BP’s CEO, and Admiral Thad Allen, the chief federal officer in charge of the response. They document the integration of teams composed of government officials together with 400 BP workers and 150 workers from other oil giants— with team meetings chaired by a BP manager and Coast Guard officer– together with continuous input from Ken Salazar, the US Secretary of the Interior and Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, as well as Energy Secretary Steven Chu and other scientific experts.

What they document is that: IT WORKS. And this working through will be the only way disaster will be contained.

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