Deepwater Horizon - A Very Familiar Disaster
Deepwater Horizon was a classic example of corporate negligence and 'An Accident Waiting to Happen'. Is there something embedded in our DNA?
Pausing for a moment on the threshold of the climate crisis, I look at a few of of those low probability, high impact events that nobody thinks will ever happen, but invariably do actually happen, with Deepwater Horizon taking centre stage.
On 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolded. Six months later, National Geographic Magazine ran a special report on the Gulf spill. It gave a detailed analysis of the events leading up to and surrounding the disaster.
Essentially the Deepwater Horizon project was a major headache right from the start. As one worker put it; ‘This has been a nightmare well,’ about a week before the disaster.
Prior to this, the Exxon Valdez had made the headlines in 1989:
To many people in industry and government, spills from tankers like the Exxon Valdez seemed a much larger threat. The Minerals Management Service (MMS), the federal agency that regulated offshore drilling, had claimed that the chances of a blowout were less than one percent, and that even if one did happen, it wouldn’t release much oil.
Highlighting the risks of deep water drilling:
Temperatures at the seafloor are near freezing, while the oil reservoirs can hit 400 degrees Fahrenheit; they’re like hot, shaken soda bottles just waiting for someone to pop the top. Pockets of explosive methane gas and methane hydrates, frozen but unstable, lurk in the sediment, increasing the risk of a blowout.
Since the mid 1990s, exploration in the Gulf had expanded rapidly, with more emphasis on deep water drilling:
As technology was taking drillers deeper, however, the methods for preventing blowouts and cleaning up spills did not keep pace. Since the early 2000s, reports from industry and academia warned of the increasing risk of deepwater blowouts, the fallibility of blowout preventers, and the difficulty of stopping a deepwater spill after it started — a special concern given that deepwater wells, because they’re under such high pressure, can spout as much as 100,000 barrels a day.
The Minerals Management Service, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) is responsible for overseeing the safe and environmentally responsible development of energy and mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. It appears that they were turning a blind eye to concerns, despite evidence of emerging risks. It was in the wake of the disaster that the MMS was reorganised — with the name change.
Following the disaster, it emerged that the fail-safe device:
had itself been beset by leaks and maintenance problems. When a geyser of drilling mud erupted onto the rig, all attempts to activate the blowout preventer failed.
BP was the architect of its own demise. After taking over two US oil companies (Amoco and ARCO), it got rid of thousands of veteran oil workers. This reduced levels of expertise within the company causing BP to rely on contractors. To make matters worse, BPs ‘disaster plan’ was itself a disaster:
a worst-case spill would do minimal harm to the Gulf’s fisheries and wildlife — including walruses, sea otters, and sea lions.
There are no walruses, sea otters, or sea lions in the Gulf. BP’s plan also listed as an emergency responder a marine biologist who had been dead for years, and it gave the Web address of an entertainment site in Japan as an emergency source of spill-response equipment. The widely reported gaffes had appeared in other oil companies’ spill-response plans as well. They had simply been cut and pasted from older plans prepared for the Arctic.
Mandy Joye, one of the scientists investigating the effects of the spill, had this to say:
“The Deepwater Horizon incident is a direct consequence of our global addiction to oil. Incidents like this are inevitable as we drill in deeper and deeper waters. We’re playing a very dangerous game here. If this isn’t a call to green power, I don’t know what is.”
What were the long term environmental impacts of the spill? National Geographic revisited the issue ten years later. The most obvious impacts were wildlife. Today the legacy remains with some species having reproductive issues and other problems, whilst others are recovering from the disaster. Corals have been impacted with some lasting damage.
A fallout from the disaster - literally - was the accumulation of lumps that fell to the bottom of the seafloor. Scientists call this ‘marine snow’. This left a thick blanket on the seafloor, impacting organisms that live there. It is reckoned that this process has happened during previous spill events in the past. The cleanup process may have also unwittingly contributed to the effect.
The really damning part about all this is that the disaster was avoidable, An Accident Waiting to Happen, as the headline from YaleEnvironment360 proclaimed. Only weeks before the disaster, President Barrack Obama had lifted a moratorium on offshore drilling. In an ominous reflection, given the revelations in my previous article on climate change:
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic “low probability, high impact event” — the kind we’ve seen more than our share of recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there’s a single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it’s that pre-disaster assumptions tend to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The Gulf spill is no exception.
Flawed planning seems to be endemic within the industry:
a study of 600 major equipment failures in offshore drilling structures done by Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that 80 percent were due to “human and organizational factors,” and 50 percent of those due to flaws in the engineering design of equipment or processes.
And the common denominator underlining these problems are “hubris, arrogance, ignorance… combined with a natural hazard.” This is a familiar pattern that has been enshrined in a classic tale that has become embedded in common folklore. Everyone knows about the story of the Titanic - at least partly. But the complacency that led to sinking of the world biggest liner at the time didn’t just happen on the night. It was a catalogue of errors from day one since it first became a blue print on a sheet of paper. This sort of predicament has been given a name. Its called ‘Titanic syndrome’.
T
he Titanic (Source: Wikipedia) was built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Its name comes from the Titans of Greek mythology. The story begins in 1907 at a meeting between White Star Lines chair and director, Joseph Bruce Ismay and John Pierpont Morgan, a Wall St tycoon, whose business led to the emergence of the banking empire, J.P.Morgan Chase.
White Star was in competition with Cunard. It wanted to build three ships that would be the biggest and most luxurious in the world. Because of the size of the ships, it became a major engineering challenge. Interestingly the completion of the Titanic was delayed due to additional modifications and repairs to another ship. As such, the ships fate may have been averted…
Finally the ship began its maiden voyage from Southampton dock, narrowly avoiding a collision with another ship, as it left port. As the ship approached the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, it received several warnings of drifting ice, but Captain Edward Smith ignored them. Ships had been involved with collisions before without serious incident and there was a belief that modern ships would be able to cope with ice problems.
At 11:40 p.m. on 14 April, lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg straight ahead and alerted the bridge. First Officer William Murdoch ordered the ship to steer around and the engines to be reversed, but it was too late, the starboard side of Titanic struck the iceberg, creating a series of holes below the waterline. Five of the ship's watertight compartments were breached, one more than was safe. As such the ship was doomed. And this was when the shortcomings were exposed.
The vessel could accommodate 48 lifeboats. But because the ship was deemed unsinkable, only 20 were carried. The crew had no experience in dealing with an emergency, resulting in many of the boats being launched half empty. The area where the ship sank is now known as Iceberg Alley.
Two inquires were set up in the US and the UK over the disaster. The main findings of the US inquiry, which were presided over by Senator William Alden Smith, were:
A lack of emergency preparations had left Titanic's passengers and crew in "a state of absolute unpreparedness", and the evacuation had been chaotic: "No general alarm was given, no ship's officers formally assembled, no orderly routine was attempted or organized system of safety begun."
The ship's safety and life-saving equipment had not been properly tested.
Titanic's Captain Edward Smith had shown an "indifference to danger [that] was one of the direct and contributing causes of this unnecessary tragedy."
The lack of lifeboats was the fault of the British Board of Trade, "to whose laxity of regulation and hasty inspection the world is largely indebted for this awful tragedy."
The SS Californian had been "much nearer [to Titanic] than the captain is willing to admit" and the British Government should take "drastic action" against him for his actions.
J. Bruce Ismay had not ordered Captain Smith to put on extra speed, but Ismay's presence on board may have contributed to the captain's decision to do so.
Third-class passengers had not been prevented from reaching the lifeboats, but had in many cases not realised until it was too late that the ship was sinking.
The key issue here was that many of the shortcomings that led to the disaster were not actually illegal as such and in many cases were standard practice. Given the criticisms of British interests in the final report, it was heavily criticised in Britain. The British press were quick to engage in a concerted smear campaign against Senator Smith. In short, the British establishment didn’t take too kindly to the efficient openness and transparency of the US inquiry.
A few months later, the UK inquiry was concluded. The responsibility for setting up an inquiry lay with the British Board of Trade. During the inquiry, it was noted that a fire had burned in the coal hold for a number of days. Modern interpretations of this indicate that such a fire may have compromised hull integrity. The general conclusion was that the ship sunk solely due to the result of colliding with the iceberg, not due to any inherent flaws with the ship and that the collision had been brought about by a dangerously fast speed in icy waters.
The report was generally well received. But some observers pointed out rather obvious conflicts of interest by the fact the the Board of trade had instigated the inquiry, thus protecting itself and avoiding any dispute ramifications.
There are other factors involved in the disaster that has been a source of conjecture since the sinking, such as the proximity of the SS Californian and the fact that flares set off by the Titanic were ignored. Suffice to say, the disaster prompted changes in maritime law and safety procedures were introduced, with many practices standardised and unsafe conventions discarded. But the ‘Titanic Syndrome’ still prevails and the Deepwater Horizon falls into that category.
As with many disasters, there’s usually more than one actor involved. Although BP bore the brunt of what happened, the two other main actors involved were Transocean and Halliburton. A federal report outlined the failings.
A
nother famous disaster was the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Again we see warning being ignored. On several occasions TEPCO, the Japanese electric company (amongst others) warned officials of a Tsunami risk, but these were ignored as unrealistic.
O
ne disaster that is difficult to match and is even more tragic than the Titanic was the Chernobyl disaster on 26 April 1986. The disaster was an astonishing catalogue of errors and incompetence that exposed the systemic failings of the Soviet system at the time. It ushered in the end of the cold war and the Soviet era.
But the greatest disaster of all lies in the wings and most ominously we see the same patterns leading in the same direction, as the Earthship Titanic steams full speed ahead to the greatest collision humanity will ever suffer. The ignored warnings of the climate crisis, missed opportunities, over confidence and belief in our superior technical prowess. Its all there.
And of course, we’ve just collided with the Coronavirus ‘iceberg’ and all the hubris associated with that. It all seems rather inevitable, doesn’t it? It would seem there is indeed something embedded in our DNA.
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