Federal Regulators Allowed Oil Companies To Decide Safety Issues
I noted in my recent article Oil Spills And Troubled Waters:
When safety depends on the ability to shut down a system by blocking a fluid flow it is absolutely imperative that the system should incorporate 'fail safe' design principles: the system should fail into the safest possible state.
The most widely known fail safe devices are fuses and circuit breakers. It is basic common sense that a fault condition should shut off power rather than risk fire or electrocution.
Here in the UK, every house has a water shut-off valve where the mains enters the property. There are other shut-off valves in every street. Whilst it is possible to install a new stopcock in the absence of an upstream shutoff, property owners would rather not see it done. It tends to get rather messy.
The NYT reports today:
Regulator Deferred to Oil Industry on Offshore Rig Safety
Federal regulators warned offshore rig operators more than a decade ago that they needed to install backup systems to control the giant undersea valves known as blowout preventers, used to cut off the flow of oil from a well in an emergency.The warnings were repeated in 2004 and 2009. Yet the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency charged both with regulating the oil industry and with collecting royalties from it, never took steps to comprehensively address the issue, relying instead on industry assurances that they were on top of the problem, a review of documents shows.
If, after reading the NYT article you are not sure about the industry's ability to regulate itself without government interference, you may care to check out the video of what happened to Lake Peigneur in Wild Wells.
