Day 87 “Somebody Actively Takes Steps To Defeat The Safety Protection”

Note: Just in case the history books say otherwise, let it be noted here that it took 87 days to cap the Macondo well. Now we wait on the relief well for “final” work.

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Set aside the catastrophic risk aspect of this disaster for a few minutes of preventative analysis. No “comprehensive,” company-wide safety program on the planet can combat the ultimate imperative of the production side of modern businesses, which is to get the job done as quickly and economically as possible no matter what. This has some startlingly obvious repercussions.

NPR | Massey Mine Workers Disabled Safety Monitor

… an electrician deliberately disabled a methane gas monitor on a continuous mining machine because the monitor repeatedly shut down the machine. Three witnesses say the electrician was ordered by a mine supervisor to “bridge” the automatic shutoff mechanism in the monitor.

“What makes it criminal is that somebody actively takes steps to defeat the safety protection. And that should be prosecuted. You’ve put production over the safety of your employees.”

Digital Journal | Shortcuts may have led to well blow-out, BP faces record fines

An independent engineer with expertise in well failure analysis has called BP“s actions before the blowout as horribly negligent. Gordon Aaker, Jr, P.E., is a Failure Analysis Consultant with the firm Engineering Services, LLP, and told Committee staff it was unheard of not to perform a cement bond log with the single casing method.

Now, was this just a series of bad decisions by a few employees on a given project? How did these employees gain the leeway to authorize said unsafe activity without blessings from farther up the chain? Or do higher-ups not care how the job is done until a mine or rig explodes into a PR nightmare? Either approach is frightening. I hope these are questions being discussed during the (ersatz) moratorium.