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They Took Off Their Engineering Hats

Tue, 15 Jun 2010, 06:42 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

A hard problem to solve.

Why don’t you tell me how your happy-talk can stop the spewing oil in the Gulf? Tell me how being a team player would help or how spin and PR will. Show me how the invisible hand will fix the glop and the death. Tell me how innovation that flows from unfettered profit can shut off the spigot. And tell me how thugs keeping the press away contributes.

No…

Happy-talk doesn’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve. Being a team player doesn’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve. Spin and PR and lies don’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve. Blind faith in the invisible hand doesn’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve. Innovation that derives from greed doesn’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve. And finally covering up the problem by intimidating the press doesn’t help when you’ve got a hard problem to solve.

When you have a hard problem to solve, you need more than good ol’ boys with firm handshakes and cowboy attitudes.

Engineering hats.

And boy do the BP guys have a hard problem to solve. They knew it before it blew up. But they took off their engineering hats and took shortcuts because time was money and money is king and … you know … bad things don’t happen in the land of happy-talk and free markets and captured federal regulators, so who needs good contingency plans.

They took off their engineering hats and put on their management hats, and … kaboom … now their bad problem has become a calamity.

It’s the same calamity, is just so happens, that Transocean (nee Sonat) had with Ixtoc 31 years ago when they poked into the earth and blew up a well and weren’t able to top hat it or top kill it or junk shot it or do anything to stop the spew for 290 days. For years, a trip to the beach meant taking WD40 with you to get the goo off your feet, and heaven help you if it got in your hair.

BP has the same problem: same problem, same company owning the rig, same inadequate backup plans. The same problem … um … except that this one is a mile under the sea. And their engineering hats lay crumpled on the floor!

I know, I know. I’m a cynic and it gets tiresome. But you know when you’re playing with fire, you really ought to consider that the sky really could fall. BP really ought to have had realistic backup plans that were based on more than cut & paste. They didn’t.  (Really: Walruses in the Gulf!?)

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