While all of these design issues contributed to the disaster, ALL of them could have been avoided.
The engineers knew the risks, and questioned them, the science was good, the people who made the decisions were well qualified…it was the human psyche that failed everyone…why? Was it a lack of monitoring the well while it was still full of drilling fluid issue? The engineers were quite aware of these other failure modes but, for various reasons, they discounted them as possibilities. However, the cement could be in position and yet fail for other reasons. Everyone agreed that getting the cement in place would give adequate zonal isolation. This undermined all subsequent integrity assurance activities. The catalyst for the domino affect that occurred was the fact that it wasn’t recognised that the cement job had failed.
A lack of understanding of defense-in-depth. A decentralized organizational structure. While investigating the more complex view of accident causation it was identified that a series of critical defences had failed but the investigation also identified corporate failures like: 
Misinterpretation of the well integrity test. Decision to dispense with cement evaluation. The defence barriers that failed at Macondo which were identified in the investigation into the disaster were: The prevention of major accidents depends on defence-in-depth – a series of barriers to keep hazards under control. The BOP was only the last line of defence and should not have been the most important. Images of it were relayed on news broadcasts throughout the world as futile efforts were made to try and stem the flow of oil pouring through the failed BOP on the seabed. In the weeks following the disaster, the Deepwater Horizon’s Blow Out Preventer (BOP) reached almost cult status. Among other things, it’s about the organisational structures and cultures that humans collectively create, and about how these in turn shape the behaviour and the ideas of individuals. In his book “Disastrous Decisions: The Human and Organisational Causes of the Gulf of Mexico Blowout,” Andrew Hopkins discusses the human and organisational factors that contributed to this disaster and the sociological explanations for the extraordinary sequence of events that culminated in the explosion that eventually sealed the fate for not only the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible drilling rig but also the lives of 11 workers on it. Some like to consider it as a result of operating at the limits of known technology that the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred on the Macondo well, but it’s better viewed as a result of organisational failure rather then technological complexity. With the release of the “ Deepwater Horizon” movie on the 30th September 2016, it’s a timely reminder to learn more about what actually happened on the rig that fateful day of 20th April 2010.
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