They say that those who forget history are forced to repeat it. But when it comes to workplace and environmental disasters, that’s not exactly true. Because while the politicians and their corporate supporters are doing the forgetting, it is the workers, the environment and surrounding communities that ultimately pay the price when the inevitable — and preventable — tragedies come home to roost.
In the Spring and Summer of 2010 this nation learned a lot about the high cost of offshore oil drilling and lax regulation. And the nation would pay that price in 11 workplace deaths on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and the largest oil spill in the history of the world. The lessons learned about how to prevent such disasters in the future were soon written into regulations issued by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, headed by former federal prosecutor Michael R. Bromwich.