The Obama Administration’s plan to split the Minerals Management Service into two agencies — one to manage leases and one to regulate safety — is good as far as it goes. If they’re really serious, they’ll put the National Transportation Safety Board, or a similar new agency, in charge of investigating rig accidents and spills.
The NTSB already investigates pipeline accidents, so they have some expertise in a related technology. They have an established culture of independence, fairness and thoroughness. And the FAA/NTSB model of regulator/investigator is a proven one that could work for the MMS.
There are a couple “investigations” of the current spill mentioned in the press. I’ll bet they don’t approach the thoroughness and professionalism of an NTSB inquiry, which can run for dozens of pages, even for nonfatal incidents.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
I wonder how the NTSB hasn’t been “captured” yet like all the other regulatory agencies.
wrb
This is an excellent idea
Butch
The Denver Post is reporting today that a larger percentage of offshore drillling plans have been approved without comprehensive environmental reviews under the Obama administration than under Bush; more than 80 percent have been permitted under “categorical exclusions,” which rely on general a 2006 environmental impact statement for a 45 million acre area.
AhabTRuler
The NTSB lacks rule-aking and regulatory power, so they can only issue advisories. The power to enforce resides in the FAA (and other agencies for non-air travel), so that is the agency that industry has captured. The NTSB isn’t worth the time or effort.
The Moar You Know
I think that’s a great idea, mistermix. Only problem I can see is that the NTSB relies a lot on SMEs, and those aren’t cheap.
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: I can only give you an example from the airline industry because that’s what I’m most familiar with. If the airline industry bought the NTSB and got air crashes whitewashed, the public would figure that out in short order and stop flying entirely, which would destroy the industry.
Flying is optional, and people are instinctively scared of it. It wouldn’t take much to get people off the planes, and the industry knows it.
Additionally, planes and crew represent an enormous capital investment by airlines – it is in their own best interests to not only not have plane crashes, but to prevent them.
This is what has to be done to the oil companies; make failure so expensive and catastrophic to the bottom line that they will embrace regulation, as the alternative would be so much worse. We obviously haven’t done that.
cmorenc
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
Probably because wrt their marquis area of investigation, aircraft safety and accidents, the industry realizes that there’s enough inherent broad public anxiety about the risks of flying (despite its ubiquitous commonality) that the industry could be destroyed by lack of public confidence in the scrupulous honesty and thoroughness of investigations into the causes of crashes and failures. People don’t share nearly the same instinctive, physical fear of oil spills and stock market manipulation that they do over aircraft safety. The industry also realizes that their own investigation of an accident could never regain the sort of public credibility a trusted, thorough NTSB investigation could, including about what the necessary corrective measures are.
Karmakin
Moar:Also it’s a different market. Air flight, in enough cases, the customer can simply say no to really cause an impact to the industry. In terms of oil and energy, we simply don’t have that realistic option at this point.
This goes beyond market capture. Because the market is captured so strongly in this, a government is directly blamed if the market goes against the consumer. People get pissed at the government when gas prices go up. In that way, that leads governments to do whatever they can to keep gas prices low.
As I’ve said before and I’ll say it again. I personally think that corruption is overrated. The far right is motivated by ideology, but the centrists are motivated by doing “right” by their core “swing voter”. Who are interested in cheap gas, and rising property and investment values.
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
That’s harder to do with oil than with planes. You can opt out of planes, but you can’t opt out of cars. Not like I can just start filling up on coal or sunshine (until I get an electric, at which point I don’t need oil to begin with).
And the only thing that makes catastrophes like an oil spill truly expensive are the civil suites for property damage. When a plane goes down, you’re dealing with a highly publicized civilian massacre. But events like the Valdez only result in widescale real estate and ecological damage.
If the oil spills and explosions killed more people (especially, more customers) you’d get better traction.
jayackroyd
John Varley’s time travel novel Millenium provides a painless introduction to NTSB practices.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Glad you mentioned NTSB. I was thinking about their approach to investigation while watching these ridiculous “hearings” into the Gulf oil spill.
The reason why the parties to the oil rig disaster are acting the way they are is that this circus is being held in public. When NTSB takes on an accident, they work with the parties behind the scenes to get cooperation and disclosure away from the public eye. Everything is revealed when their report is published, but while the facts are being gathered and the technical work is being done, the public is kept at bay. This is a long and difficult process, one of the reasons why their investigations can take months, even a year or more, before the final report is written.
This business of having executives representing the various parties trying to outdo each other in responsibility avoidance is just absurd. Instead, the government needs to gather the technical experts who work for the parties and establish a foundation of knowledge about what happened first.
Exactly what NTSB is good at. If I were king, I’d create a National Regulatory Investigation Board that would oversee the subject-specific investigative boards and work with them to create and operate within the kind of process that NTSB uses now. My NRIB would mentor the other boards and see that the best practices were followed in their investigations.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@AhabTRuler:
The fact that NTSB is not the regulator is exactly why their process works. That’s how they maintain independence. They can call out the regulator, the FAA, just as they would call out an airline or a manufacturer or a maintenance provider or any institution that is a party to the event.
NTSB is, correctly, the model for how to do this, not just in the US, but in the world. It’s exactly how government best serves the interests of the public.
Citizen_X
So do oil rigs and their crews. Hell, so do coal mines and their crews. But, as others have pointed out, most people have no direct contact with oil or coal production, but, at most, with the selling of refined products (the “downstream” end of the industry, in oil parlance). They’re insulated from the extractive activities.
If people could somehow be moved by airplanes without being in them, then hell yes, airlines would push production to the point that they’d lose the occasional plane and aircrew. It would tragic, unfortunate, unforeseeable, blah blah blah, but ultimately part of the cost of doing business.
Citizen_X
@ChockFullO’Nuts: A excellent example of why transparency is not always the best policy.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@Citizen_X:
Yes, what passes for “transparency” and openness, such as the example of these Gulf spill hearings … is really just a chance for politicians to posture and pose before the cameras and cry crocodile tears about whatever bad thing happened …. and then go back to doing nothing, or making things worse, when nobody is looking.
Keeping an agency like NTSB separate from the other agencies and independent and nonpolitical, and letting them work off camera until all the technical facts are in order, is key to success in their business. They are never about posturing and always about getting at the truth. It’s still a human and therefore imperfect process, but I don’t know of an example of government working for our interests that works better than NTSB.
wrb
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
brilliant
—
ot: I just noticed that my nom has been coming up blue, like it links to a web page. The autofill on this laptop has decided that the Balloon Juice “webpage” field must be filled with the url of a blank Facebook page. I don’t know how to make it stop.
Zuzu's Petals
It’s a little hard to see how this would work out in the practical realm.
As it is, MMS is quite active in inspecting rigs and facilities (including unannounced visits) and enforcing safety regulations. From what I understand, they don’t hesitate to write up even the smallest infractions. And I understand their accident investigations are quite thorough and detailed.
So how would one distinguish between which accidents are to be investigated by MMS and NTSB? A crane falls over, causing damage and/or injuries…a crane falls over, causing a fatality? A generator blows out, causing a small fire…a generator causes a bigger fire? Is it a matter of degree or … what?
Same with spills. A spill caused by an onboard diesel leak … a spill caused by a subsurface hose rupture…a spill caused by a blowout? A matter of degree, or source, or … what?
Why could MMS cite and ensure compliance for some accidents and spills but not for others?
mistermix
@Zuzu’s Petals: The FAA and NTSB have it pretty well worked out. FAA inspectors still inspect and write up infractions. The NTSB investigates (or at least records) every incident. This includes non-fatal incidents, like engine fires and airspace incursions.
The NTSB also makes suggestions to the FAA about where its regulations are falling short in practice, based on NTSB experience.
The NTSB has no regulatory power, but Congress and the media can look to NTSB records to hold regulators accountable.
Zuzu's Petals
PS, NTSB says it investigates pipeline accidents because:
Not sure how that translates to work on a stationary rig, anymore than it would translate to work at a land based oil drilling site. Just my opinion.
Zuzu's Petals
@mistermix:
Well, I do see that the NTSB investigates the loss of or major property damage to “self-propelled vessels” so maybe that include semi submersibles like DWH (which can move under their own power). Maybe it wouldn’t take too much fiddling to give them authority to investigate major rig accidents in general.
Still, it’s hard to see where there wouldn’t be a lot of overlap with MMS, and I’d guess they’d leave off investigating the spill as opposed to the accident.
Zuzu's Petals
Sorry, here’s the link @19:
What is the NTSB
anon
Sorry to rain on what little promising information is in this story. I happen to work for the FAA. I have for 10 years. Yeah, that’s the way it’s SUPPOSED to work, but we are getting more and more embedded with industry all the time. The airlines, the companies that make aircraft, and the companies that make aircraft systems. We are moving more and more toward letting these companies oversee themselves. We are only going to monitor their procedures. Yeah, that’s going to work…. It has worked so well in all these other industries.
I am severely pissed and depressed about my job right at the moment. We may be better than other government agencies. Certainly the MMS, I think it is called. But we are also trending in a way that a lot of us find very alarming.
Zuzu's Petals
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
I don’t disagree about the absurdity of having executives point fingers doing public “events,” but of course the various public agencies – USCG, Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, MMS, etc. – are still doing the hard fact-gathering and investigating behind the scenes.
Also too, the NTSB also conducts public hearings, and transportation executives haven’t shied away from pointing fingers on those occasions too.
RAM
Maybe what we need is a National Safety Investigation Agency, with divisions tasked to investigate various areas such as transportation, nuclear and conventional power generation, mining, and petroleum extraction, that would have the independent culture (and the necessary guarantees of that independence) that the NTSB does.
anon
The problem with agencies like the NTSB is that they really only get involved after something has already gone wrong, like an accident or very serious safety related incident. It would be really nice if we could be proactive, worry about problems BEFORE they occur and not just assume that they won’t occur. But certainly, there must be independence there. Dual but competing purposes are not very conducive to anything. It appears, to me, that Big Money is going to win out over safety considerations all the time.