The Blame Game

Everyone is looking for somewhere to point the finger over this huge catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, but they don't seem to be looking in the mirror while they do this.  They want to fault the big bad oil companies and their contractors, or the federal government, but they don't seem to want to accept any personal responsibility for this tragedy.

I am as guilty as the next person (except if that person is my friend Danielle who bikes to work probably 90% of the year here in Juneau) of hopping in the car to run a quick errand when I could have taken my bike, and driving to work because it is much faster (and doesn't deprive me of my much needed beauty sleep).  Time, cost and expediency are very important in this personal equation.

The same could be said for the oil companies who don't want to be regulated any more than the average citizen wants big brother government telling them what they can and cannot do in their lives.  Why would they take steps that are not required by the government agencies in the US which regulate the drilling process?  That would only cost them more time and money, and of course they would pass those costs on to the consumers....   would you like your gas prices to be higher to make it less likely that something like the explosion on Deepwater Horizon and the resulting oil spill might happen?  I would like to think the answer would be yes, but humans don't often choose prevention over cleaning up the mess afterwards.  You don't know for sure that the mess will ever happen, so you gamble that the cleanup won't be necessary, and save a few pennies per gallon at the pump each time you fill up your tank.

I remember reading in the first few days after the explosion, that the Norwegian government requires an extra safety switch (costing $150,000 US) to be installed with each blowout preventer.  I am not saying that if these were installed the accident would not have happened, but the federal government in Norway owns the oil companies, so that puts an interesting twist on this issue.

I have been a member of the United States Coast Guard for 19 years, and I am part of our response community.  If you have read my previous blogs, you might remember that I am about to embark on my second assignment as a Chief of Response at a field unit, or Sector, this time in Detroit.  In this job, I will be the one responsible for coordinating spill response in parts of Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Saint Clair and the rivers between them.  I will have Sector Sault Saint Marie to work with up north, Sector Buffalo to my east, and the Canadians share part of all those bodies of water.  Coordinating does not mean that coasties are the ones actually picking up globules of oil from the beach, or running the skimmers or placing boom on the water.  Coordinating means that we are have oversight of what the responsible party is doing to clean up the mess they have made.

It is true that the government could take over the spill response entirely, but the people with the expertise are the oil companies themselves,  not the federal regulators.  Please see this article in the New York Times which demonstrates the principle of regulatory capture (e.g. - when the agencies who are supposed to be keeping the oil companies honest are basically rubber stamping requests to deviate from the normal safety procedures).    [The picture above of the initial attempts to put out the fire on the rig was borrowed from the same article.]

The part that is most frustrating about this spill is that the source has not been turned off.  With most spills in recent US history (post Exxon Valdez in 1989), the source has been a ship, which carries only a finite amount of product.  I am hoping just like everyone else that British Petroleum is able to cap this well as soon as possible.  Then we can all focus on how to contain the oil that has already been released into the Gulf.