On the day he got news that the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caught fire in the Gulf of Mexico, BP chief executive Tony Hayward received a series of crisis updates in his London offices. The rig belonged to Transocean, but BP had leased it to drill an exploration well and BP bore legal responsibility for any consequences.Gee, that's hard to say. Maybe it is the corporate culture that put safety as the least important concern. Maybe it was the flagrant disregard for drilling protocols. Maybe it was the mindset that they could just disregard good practices because the blowout preventer would stop anything bad from happening. Maybe it's been the constant attempts since then to lie about the scale of what has been going on, the attempts to cheap-out on cleanup and gaining control of the blowout, and the still-continuing-on actions by BP to hinder news collection. BP has, in the space of two months, become the modern corporate poster child for arrogance and a mindset that rules are for the other guys to follow.
The grim updates were interspersed with long silences. One person there said that on several occasions, Hayward asked, "What did we do to deserve this?"
In some ways, though, for all of the blame and faint regard as "the British Polluters" that BP is richly earning, their mindset is far from unique. I see it in the Northeast every Winter and I have since SUVs began appearing in numbers nearly 20 years ago. It seems that after each significant snowstorm, that you can drive down the highway and see the wreckers hauling SUVs from the median, from the ditches along the highway and even from off guardrails. The drivers of those things think that they are like tanks and they have a mindset of invulnerability that will be proven wrong, to their cost.
The same thing began to happen on wet roads when ABS brakes first came out; some drivers stopped being cautious and thought that the new magic brakes would prevent them from crashing. Which they didn't; the brakes only made it more likely that they would crash head-on into whatever they hit, rather than while spinning around.
There have been more than one case of pilots selecting a direct course on their GPSs and then slaving that to the autopilot without due consideration of the terrain between the point of departure and their destination. The same mindset was probably one of the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, for all I know.
Relying on safety devices to save the day is a bit of human folly. Those devices are not there to be the primary guardians, they are there as back-ups. BP's attitude in its daily practices was like wearing steel-toed shoes and routinely dropping heavy weights on one's foot.
It doesn't take any significant degree of smarts to know this. BP's actions were like letting a child play with matches because the house has smoke detectors installed. BP is reaping what it sowed, but they are far from alone.
2 comments:
Chernobyl was truly complicated. The official line is that the local workers and engineers shut down a bunch of safety systems that were interfering with a reliability test they were doing. A more recent, less old-Soviet-nuke-scientist analysis indicates that the way the core and controls were designed was highly counterintuitive and the behavior it would exhibit in an emergency was neither understood by the designers nor conveyed to the operators, so when the operators set up the increased-reliability experiment they did so with the impression that it was going to be fine. One of the directors of the facility died of radiation poisoning, still insisting that it was impossible that the core had actually exploded and burned.
Chernobyl was more like the BP disaster, maybe worse. From the initial design and construction to the daily operation and the specific experiment underway when the plant exploded, safety was ignored -- and after the accident, too. No one took safety seriously.
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