McClatchy has a good analysis of how well we were doing on oil spill prevention and containment until the Deepwater Horizon accident:
The Coast Guard data indicate that the volume of small and large spills has declined steadily across the decades. For instance, the number of spills between 1 and 100 gallons decreased by almost 77 percent from 1973 to 2004. Spills larger than 100,000 gallons dropped by 89 percent during the same period.
I don’t buy the “culture of complacency” explanation being peddled by some of the experts quoted in the piece. Hookers and whiskey at the MMS had a lot to do with it, too.
Xboxershorts
Hookers, Whiskey and blow. Don’t forget the blow….
That’s a big part of their problem. They were doing the wrong kind of drugs at MMS!
End the prohibition on hemp, and we end all of our problems with dirty foul petroleum.
Kered (formerly Derek)
OT, but if you had questions about Inception, this will probably answer them: https://balloon-juice.com/2010/07/23/open-thread-747/#comment-1909970
wilfred
Record flatters to deceive, like Union Carbide and Bhopal.
Almost a virgin.
AuldBlackJack
Me neither. It’s an example of cognitive bias. Specifically not understanding low-probability events that have disastrous consequences (think oil spills, mine explosions, financial meltdowns & global warming)
TR
Meth. Don’t forget the meth.
TJ
Pipeline spills – Tanker spills – Well explosions and total failure
One of these things is not like the others.
Svlad Jelly
There’s a key word missing here: “reported.”
Reported spills have decreased.
Shelton Lankford
The watchdogs took the decade off, so we trust the reports of spills why?
Steeplejack
__
Can’t help but wonder if some part of this could be a decline in reporting of spills, what with the whole “get government out of the way of business” trend of the last 30 years.
Also, saw a story in the Times yesterday that mentions this:
That sounds sort of like a culture of complacency.
MTiffany
@TR: Damn, beat me to it.
trollhattan
I don’t believe complacency is the correct term. Rather, there’s a culture of aggressively subverting anything safety related that gets in the way of production and profits. It’s a mentality orders of magnitude worse than looking at good accident stats and concluding everything’s okay (typical corporate complacence).
Subverting safety is clearly what BP does, which puts them in the same league as Massey Energy and who knows how many other majors? How many more bodies must stack up before there are felony prosecutions?
steve
I can kind of understand this though. I’ve had lifelong sleep problems. When things happen like you’ve been awake 48 hours, you have to be back to work in 8, and after laying in bed for 3 hours you finally get to sleep, only to be woken up by a beeping garbage truck, or the kind of complete shit-for-brains who puts a glasspack muffler on a honda prelude, it can make you suicidal and too exhausted to function.
(when did we decide everything had to shriek? My microwave goes off like an air raid siren. I can’t go to mcdonalds anymore because every 12 seconds a high pitched alarm fires. When a morbidly obese woman in a nightgown in a fat-people-scooter in wal-mart starts backing up at a 1/2 mph, everyone within 20 rows is alerted. wtf?)
Robert Sneddon
The work schedule for crews on an off-shore rig typically comprises of 12-hour days, 7 days on 7 days off. The senior engineers on deck at any time are expected to make continuous manual adjustments to the rig’s drilling systems (mud weight, circulation, monitoring returns, gas levels, flow rates etc.) to keep the well from kicking or blowing out, using their expertise and knowledge reading instruments and making educated guesses about the physics of what is happening three miles below their feet.
The Deepwater rig blew up just after a shift-change when the guys going off shift after twelve hours made a series of bad decisions after a really busy workday preparing to close the well, pumping mud to a workboat, checking and setting concrete plugs etc. As far as I know nobody’s really studied the workload the crews of offshore rigs endure and the possibilities for prepackaged disasters that implies. Aircraft crashes caused in part by overworking the pilots, giving them too much to do and tiring them out resulted in a lot of research and legislation to reduce that workload and allow them to deal with abnormal situations more effectively. It might be time for similar efforts on the part of the offshore oil business and the legislatures.