BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon

ctdownunder passes along this excerpt from a NY Times article about a rig worker's testimony concerning the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon well: "The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident. ... On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to 'bypass mode.' When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded. ... Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.' 'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.' Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said." The article doesn't mention whether it was specifically a Windows BSOD, or just an error screen that happened to be blue.

Comments

Egregious

[eclectro]

There are faulty engineering and management decisions every step of the way when producing this well. This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life. The question is why is there not criminal prosecutions for bad engineering that leads to the loss of life? Why is it that only people with guns who kill people get criminal prosecutions?

Re:Egregious

[Andy Dodd]

From most of what I've read, the subcontractors in question (Halliburton and Transocean) were doing the work, but BP had full control over the operations.

The flow was something like this:
Halliburton or Transocean: That's a bad idea, we don't recommend that.
BP: Do it anyway.
H/T: OK...

Although the question is at what point H/T should have said, "Hell no!"

Re:Egregious

[shadowofwind]

What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean.

This is a common legal and accounting ploy: subcontract everything to other companies, then you're not responsible for anything, even though you're in charge of everything.

I recently worked for a company, run incidentally by the spouse of a BP chief executive, that sells a medical product for applications that the product can not legally be sold for (in the US). Its way around this is to create three companies, one for engineering, one for distribution, and one for marketing. That way, the parent company claims that its selling nothing illegally because it distributes nothing, but only provides information. And the distributor claims that it does not target its product for the illegal applications, since it merely distributes. And the engineering company evades FDA engineering process requirements by saying that it merely distributes the product made by the engineering company, which ignores the regulations because it is ostensibly not subject to regulation since it is not the distributor, and it doesn't have a distribution operation that can be shut down. But all three companies are essentially the same company, run by the same people. The 'ethic' involved is that if you haven't yet been sued successfully, or shut down by regulators, then its all good.

At least Halliburton and Transocean have a separate existence from BP. But BP is still responsible.

Re:They didn't fix a lot of things

[fyoder]

Then we need new regulations regulating regulators. And I know, you're thinking, but who will regulate the regulators of the regulators? There will be regulators for the regulators of the regulators as well. It will be regulators all the way to the bottom.

The real answer is to stop regarding corporations as 'persons' and go back to regarding them as what they are, associations, and ones which can be disbanded when they screw up big time. A corporation who, through its negligence, causes a major environmental disaster doesn't get to continue to exist.

Granted, that's unenforceable outside of a particular nation state, but it would certainly reduce share holder value if several countries, including the US, regarded it as outlaw and forbade it to do business.

Or if we're going to continue to regard them as persons, what sort of a punishment would a human person get for gross criminal negligence? What would be the corporate equivalent?

Because when it comes right down to it, regulation is better than no regulation, but ultimately can't be counted on, because there are minimal consequences for failure to comply, and because of lax enforcement in the first place.

The first rule for corporations should be that if they screw up big time, they cease to exist. But anything that draconian has to be preceded by defining corporations in law as non-persons. Sadly, given US Supreme Court rulings on the issue, it might take a constitutional amendment.

Re:That's why capitalism is broken

[Rich0]

Agreed. In fact, as long as the big company has no liability it just turns into one big race for the bottom.

Suppose you run a reputable oil-rig operations company. You'd like to have people outsource their rigs to you. You believe in safety and the environment, so you take all kinds of steps to avoid something like the BP disaster. What happens? Well, you go out of business. You have to compete against other companies that cut corners. Companies like BP don't care about the safety of your workers or the environment, since that is on you. Your competitors charge less, and that is all they care about. Sure, it isn't sustainable, but most small companies aren't sustainable. The company running the rig can pay out dividends while the money is there, and then fold when the lawsuits hit. Indeed, if you didn't run a disreputable company your shareholders would probably fire you (low dividends compared to peers) and replace you with somebody who would mismanage it.

In other industries there is a clear assignment of responsibility, which cannot be outsourced. You can hire somebody else to do the work, but not to assume the liability. If Bayer sells a bottle of tainted aspirin, then they're liable even if they bought bad pills from a supplier. The only thing they're not liable for is what happens to the package after they sell it to the warehouse/store, although they are required to put the pills in tamper-evident packaging.

Indeed, in many industries liability is personal. That's why certified engineers have to sign off on bridges - they are personally responsible for the design (but not necessarily the implementation). I think the EU does something similar for drugs.