To all those looking for a conspiracy behind the Gulf Oil Disaster:

[hedgehog]

Whether it's Tony Hayward selling his stock, Halliburton buying oil skimmers, etc etc, there are dozens of rumors flying about suggesting we have a LIHOP or MIHOP situation here. There is one major flaw to all of these conspiracy theories: they all depend on the top management knowing the technical details well enough to plan for an accident. Most top managers know and understand next to nothing about how their companies actually drill, mine manufacture, etc.

[notesdev]

1. Hayward was a geologist

so much for that theory

[hedgehog]

3. A geologist is not a drilling tech or drilling engineer. He may

have known the oil was there and had no real gut sense of the difference between drilling n 500 and 5000 ft of water!

[BeFree]

2. BP knew.

They knew. They had to know.

So what we have now is a coverup in progress. And there's your conspiracy.

Throw in Cheney lurking in the background and only a fool would discount the idea.

[hedgehog]

4. What does it mean when you say "BP knew"? BP is not a single entity but

rather a hierarchal organization. Orders flow down from the top. Information that would interfere with those orders is stopped from reaching the top. It is the nature of middle managers to downplay the concerns of subordinates and promise their own superiors to get things done. It is the nature of upper management to believe the white lies of middle management.

It's a classic situation. Everyone thinks the Challenger blew up because of a faulty O-ring. Wrong. There were people who knew about the faulty O-ring. The problem was that the people in charge of the launch knew about the faulty O-ring, but also knew there was a desire to see the launch go off on time. They put more importance on the second fact than the first. That is, they placed less importance on the possibility of a catastrophe than on the certainty of displeasing their superiors.

Ultimately, and I don't mean to blame the victims here, someone on the Deep Horizon did something he knew was dangerous. Again, it's a classic situation. Good engineers put redundant safeties into any process or product. But we have a saying, " It's impossible to make something idiot-proof because idiots are so ingenious." Most "accidents" require a series of events rather than a single event. People get used to cutting corners until the day everything falls into place. Bypassing Step "A" did not cause an accident before because Switch "B" stopped the process. So, people get used to ignoring Step "A" until the day someone else jams Switch "B" open and everything went south.

Again, I'm not blaming the victims. Whistle blowers always take the hit. The people on the platform were in a position in which they could cut corners and maybe squeak by like last time, or take a stand and be fired and blacklisted. They bet on the possibility of an "accident" vs. the certainty of financial disaster and lost.

[BeFree]

6. Bullshit

BP knew that the reservoir they were tapping could easily blow.

The orders came from the top down to ignore the dangers.

BP HQ probably got lucky on the last well and figured they'd go for broke.
They knew it and now they are going broke.

[hedgehog]

7. Exactly. Upper management was told of the dangers, but they

had gotten away with bad practices before. Every person in the link balanced the of disaster against the certainty of making more money and/or keeping or losing their job depending on their actions.

What I'm trying to say is that there is no such thing as "BP". The people at BP are the ones who screwed up, and their screw-up happened because of the way corporations are structured.

[BeFree]

8. BP is a ghost?

No such thing as BP? Can I have some of that hedge yer smoking? Don't be a hog.

[hedgehog]

9. BP is a construct. Until we rearrange the way our organizations

are run, we'll be facing one disaster after another. Somewhere out there today is a purchasing agent who is buying something from the lowest bidder because his boss is pressuring him to cut costs. The engineer will complain, the millwright will complain, but then they will shrug and install the part instead of losing their jobs. Then, six months after that, someone on back shift will jam a switch open because it's a pain to keep hitting the re-set button. Then, two weeks later, someone on day shift will overload the system, just a little, to make up for the down time the week before. Then, people will die.


So, who caused the disaster? Was it the company, the purchasing agent, his boss, the engineer, the millwright, the back shift operator, the day shift operator?

[BeFree]

10. Who caused it?

The Ghost? The Ghost of BP?

I don't get what you're getting at. But whatever.

The BP big people knew, and they dumped their load on the small people.

[hedgehog]

11. You have to take into account how people think. It's akin to

people having a fear of flying even though they are more likely to get killed in a car. Again, people will not worry about getting hit by lightning but they will buy a lottery ticket. We tend to allow our desire for a particular outcome to outweigh our knowledge of its likelihood. People don't think it out as "I would prefer that we bring the well in on time, so I will take the risk of a horrible disaster." Because they want the well to come in on time, they find a way to ignore the risk of disaster.

The people at BP didn't want their oil all over the Gulf, they wanted it in their refineries.

[Turbineguy]

5. Hanlon's Razor:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.