5 Responses

1. Greed

2. Bad management.
   The safety systems have been used and tested for years and have work. But the best safety systems and inspections are not going to work if you don’t follow they safety rules. There are lots of reports of BP management giving orders to ignore safety problems and get the job done.

3. BP is currently pointing fingers at a smaller company, Transocean, who were supposedly operating the rig that exploded. Their “blow out preventer” failed and its apparently brand new technology in. But yeah they’re just saying failed equipment over and over. I’m assuming pressure built up wayyy to high, and just blew the thing sky high.

4. http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gulf_of_mexico_oil_spill_anima.html

5. This oil rig explosion reminds me a lot about many of the significant problems our county/world has faced lately. It’s like a math formula There is a person(s) or company who carries a great deal of responsibly and who places money and self interest before their responsibilities minus a group or agency who hold a professional obligation to PREVENT a person(s) or company from creating a disaster before it begins. Multiply that by not being prepared to fix the disaster after it happens and the damage is significantly worse than what could have and should have been. All the while the cause of the disaster gets off with little consequence, sending the message to other groups that reckless behavior when personal benefit is on the line is acceptable. You can insert the BP oil spill, housing collapse, AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs bankruptcy or any other event into this formula and it fits perfectly.

   The key it seems to solve the equation (i.e. damage = 0) is to prevent the disasters in the first place. I am not naive enough to believe that every disaster can be avoided, however all of the ones I have listed could have.

   So how are we going to prevent these disasters? Most people would say have more oversight but does that always solve the problem? I work in the healthcare industry and the regulatory agencies are big on action plans when a negative outcome occurs. Usually the negative outcome is the result of a few people failing to adhere to standards already in place. This action plan invariably involves filling out a new piece of paperwork for the oversight agencies to inspect which documents that you are doing the job you are supposed to have been doing in the first place. This fails in two ways. First it takes more time away from providers doing their job as they should increasing the likely hood that someone is going to take a shortcut. Also paperwork is easily faked. Anyone can write that hey did something when they did not. It is just ink. In essence your punishing the many for the mistakes of a few. The same principle applies in the case of the BP oil rig explosion. I am sure once the government agencies who were and are still responsible for preventing oil rig disasters such as this complete their “action plans”, these plans will involve more paperwork which will accomplish nothing and may actually make a disaster more likely. Who’s watching the rig while they are filling out all of that paperwork?

   Instead of having people fill out more paperwork, have the regulatory agencies inspect more actively and more often. Yes it may slow down activity but look at the alternative. Actually we can already see the alternative in the Gulf. It is critical to find a balance between ensuring the activities the oil drilling companies engage in are safe and not interfering with their work. It requires hard work on the part of the regulatory agencies, but it can be done. They just need the right people leading them. There are a very small amount of people on this Earth who know how to perform deep water exploration for oil. I don’t believe that some bureaucrat in an office in D.C. knows how to. Get experts who know what they are doing (not former oil company workers!) and have them design and implement a rigorous inspection process.

   The other key is the impose strong monetary and criminal penalties for those in charge of the oil rigs or any other service. If the penalties for unsafe practices are worse than the consequences for the disaster, you can bet that the leadership will be singing a different tune. If the leadership of these companies function based on self interest, then appeal to that self interest with penalties that will make them want to do right. If criminal charges sound harsh in this case, 11 people died. If a drunk driver kills someone they are charged with man slaughter because they are doing something inherently dangerous which directly led to the loss of life. If they faced felony charges the people on that oil rig would have definitely have thought twice. It may not have stop every person, every time a la Bernie Madoff, but it should stop most. Plus the monetary penalties should be more stringent, both for the company and for the people in charge. Why should BP do anything differently? The clean up cost have ranged from $3 to $12 billion which seems like a staggering amount until you look at the fact that they made a little over $6 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2010. It is a drop in the bucket to BP. I am sure the same could be said for the executives who rushed the drilling company they hired. (Who I feel share equal responsibility by the way because even though they warned BP that they were doing something unsafe, they acquiesced to BP’s demands to drill faster.) The executives were faced with the choice, drill faster and make profits for the company faster which will make profits for me faster or have something go wrong and then there is no loss on my part.

   That being said, in this particular situation, I don’t know how many of the people on that oil rig who were making poor decisions loss their life. I don’t think that anyone deserves to lose their life like that. It is a shame that so many people died needlessly. My heart goes out to their loved ones. But when people who have great responsibility fail to live up to that responsibility, things happen. You do the math…