Elizabeth Jackson talks to Professor Donald Winter, the chairman of the scientific panel looking into the cause of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
A preliminary report into the cause of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has found that a series of poor decisions by uninformed staff led to the explosion which killed 11 workers and sent billions of barrels of oil gushing into the gulf.
The chairman of the scientific panel professor Donald Winter from the University of Michigan said it appeared the decisions were motivated to save BP money.
Who could possibly have guessed? (to save BP money)
So they had good intentions and weren’t evil. That’s a relief.
Where they successful?
Were
Terje said:
It also banal. The road to hell … and all that.
Put another way, they were so keen to save BP money that they thought externalising the risk to the commons would be a worthwhile idea. It also would be an idea from which they personally profited, if they gambled and won so that made it especilly worthwhile. I’m not into evil as a concept, but I know embezzling when I see it.
oops … no you have me started:
ItIt’s also banal.Fran – you didn’t answer my question?
p.s. Are you claiming that the “uninformed staff” stood to profit personally?
I’m suggesting the culture within BP was one of err on the side of the company.
That would have been encouraged by senior management.
My take on the significance of the findings of Winter’s panel is that the company, for whatever reason, was not using best practice. If they had we are led to believe everything would have been OK, although that is not absolutely clear from what has been said so far.
If they had been using best practice then there is a case for banning this kind of activity. As the matter stands it just looks like a case for tightening the regulations and supervisory regime.
Brian: Maybe best practice would have stopped this one occurring. However, best practice for containing the spill while the problem was being solved was woefully inadequate.
Also think about what would have happened if this had been under the ice?
John D, I understand that in the Gulf of Mexico there was a bug that literally ate the oil in the water. I understand the bug doesn’t exist in the Arctic.
This item talks also about the oxygen depletion issue.
Given the result the culture can’t have been strong enough.
Poison I know, but now you have to translate this catastrophy into the nuclear energy business structure possibilities. Knowing that bad things can happen does not absolutely prevent them given sufficient time and human involvement.
Bilb @ 13 in a nutshell! And I don’t think we would have the benefit of a radiation eating bug waiting to gobble up the results of murphy.
Taking it even further and imaginatively, a massive windfarm was today devastated by a collapse of a series of towers linked to poor construction work, however the environment was unaffected…
I hope they are paying these experts a lot of money to come up with such insights, industrial accidents are notoriously tricky to unravel.
I’d take all this with a grain of salt. Donald Winter’s interview here deflects attention away from Halliburton onto the “foreign” BP. I think the actual content of his investigation is narrowing down to Halliburton, as the hired experts, failing to highlight to BP the risks and problems with the way things were going. I expect political forces will once again absolve Halliburton.
We only have a few options with existing stockpiles of nuclear waste. We could:-
i) manage it long term
ii) bury it deep somewhere
iii) dilute and disperse
iv) destroy
Given that option (iv) also makes reasonably cheap electricity I see it as the best option.
Let us hope that the Prof leaves it to someone else to write the report, or nobody will be able to understand the recommendations. Admittedly, the punctuation in the transcript was poor.
“[U]ninformed staff” is certainly the purview of the employer. (Regardless of their business model, etc.)
Chookie @ 17, he sounded OK on radio, but I was so disappointed with the transcript by comparison I nearly didn’t post it. Some people talk well-formed prose, most don’t.
Couple of links:
Interim Report on Causes of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Blowout and Ways to Prevent Such Events
The ‘Prof’ (there’s a more comprehensive bio in the report itself)
Do you think we can judge the accuracy and objectivity of this report by its lead in – Jackson’s claim that the spill “sent billions of barrels of oil gushing into the gulf”.
The actual figure according to Science magazine, Liz, was 4.4 million barrels.
This is not to defend BP. It is merely to express the view that if you want facts on this issue the ABC is not necessarily the place to get them.
4.4 million barrels – that’s nearly $300 million worth of product. I suspect there are strong incentives against these sort of mistakes. It seems to me that Greed, in so far as it is a motivator for the people on the job, would have been working against this sort of error. Greed would seem to be aligned with not screwing up.
Nope, Terje: while *some* people in the company might think like that, most don’t. Decisions are often weighted heavily in favour of the short-term, even when this is obviously going to be a problem for the long-term. A simple example is the way Telstra has ‘trashed its brand’ through poor service. (I had a cold caller try to sell me Telstra services recently. I laughed at him.) Now how does this change if you don’t *know* you’re creating a long-term problem?
The report indicates that the rig people didn’t have a formal set of criteria for declaring the hole properly capped; ie, they didn’t have a good idea of the likelihood of a long-term problem. The decision to focus on the short-term need to save money was therfore more salient to decision-makers than the possibility of a blowout.
So Greed leads companies to lose money. Interesting.
TerjeP – it seems no-one answered yr question @ 2. – No.
“So Greed leads companies to lose money” – Well duh.
Interesting? Well yeah, fact of life? I’ll bet my pin workshop and invisible hand agains a pack of redheads, yes.
Terje – is it your contention that when companies lose money, it’s only when all the greed is gone?
Greed is not incompatible with failure, you know; nor with the success of a few individuals at the expense of the whole.