Well, if the oil industry is anything like the electric power industry, then they have "dumbed down" just about every aspect of every technical job by making written procedures that MUST be followed for almost every conceivable circumstance. The unfortunate side effect of that is that people with true knowledge and decision-making ability are disappearing, and being replaced by obedient drones who have no clue why they're doing what they're doing, but are instead "just following the procedure".
Yes, people who can think for themselves and have broad knowledge and skills are rare. And that generally costs money. Most companies want to find a way to cut that kind of costs. Also the scale of the companies has become so large as to make it very difficult to effectively use the key people on the important tasks.
I dont know if that’s true or not for the oil patch, but for a project such as this one they should have had only the top shelf people out there.
All these rigs have a Sat-link which means there’s computers at the home office, probably Houston in this case, that monitor everything that happens on the rig, at least right up until the explosion. They would have records of the “kick” and everything the drillers were doing. Why is that information not out yet?
To get around this problem, Exxon preferred to use people that had no experience in actual inspection procedures to monitor the inspections.
Exxon preferred people that would simply follow the specs and not question what was being done or even have enough knowledge to know it the equipment used to preform the inspection was working properly.
Add telecommunications to that, too. After I spent more than 20 years in the biz I remain stunned that the phone system works at all in this country because of the lack of technical expertise I found with every encounter with major carriers like AT&T, Bell and others......