Posted on 09/11/2010 2:34:34 PM PDT by Hojczyk
was a triumphant evening for British Petroleum and the crew of Transocean's Deepwater Horizon. Floating 52 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 5000 feet of water, the oil rig was close to completing a well 13,000 feet beneath the ocean floor—an operation so complex it's often compared to flying to the moon. Now, after 74 days of drilling, BP was preparing to cap the Macondo Prospect well until a production rig was brought in to start harvesting oil and gas. Around 10:30 in the morning, a helicopter flew in four senior executives—two from BP and two from Transocean, to celebrate the well's completion and the rig's seven years without a serious accident.
What unfolded over the next few hours could almost have been written as a treatise in the science of industrial accidents. As with the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partial core meltdown in 1979, the chemical leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the space shuttle Challenger disintegration in 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear plant explosions and fi re that same year, there is never one mistake or one malfunctioning piece of hardware to blame. Instead, the Horizon disaster resulted from many human and technical failings in a risk-taking corporation that operated in an industry with ineffective regulatory oversight. By the time the blowout came, it was almost inevitable. "It's clear that the problem is not technology, but people," says Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the university of California–Berkeley. "It was a chain of important errors made by people in critical situations involving complex technological and organization systems."
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Really, all that matters is what BP says. Who wants to know any more.
Want to see how someone will do his job? Find out how he is incentivized. About 2.5 decades ago we had an incentive program for the land and exploration departments based on acres leased. Guess what, we had a lot of worthless acres leased.
Shameless.
Good summary. I agree.
Well, no, the problem is that what this story says is less than what BP says, not more.
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