Let’s put aside the inflammatory accusations of BP’s blunder in the Gulf, summarized in Mother Jones, magazine’s September/ October issue cover story: the company “has to lie, cheat and stall its way out of a problem;” scientists have been bribed to keep their research secret; fishermen have been paid off to avoid rioting; BP’s Gulf oil-spill plan included a wildlife assessment for walruses and an on-call expert who has been dead for years.
OK, we get the picture.
And let’s back off from conclusions reached in an Associated Press article published this summer: 1) disasters of all sorts result from the acts of stupid, thoughtless, arrogant, people; 2) a cycle of hubris is more or less a hopeless condition of human nature.
Damning critiques could fill a library since the Deepwater Horizon rig went down on April 20. We’ll let investigators tackle the big picture. What is important for safety and health pros with day-to-day responsibilities is the question posed by The Wall Street Journal:
“Why didn’t the crew recognize the warning signs in the final hours?”
For safety and health pros, the event might be a collapsing trench, a hole in a roof, a forklift in reverse, an explosion from accumulated dust, a shirt caught on a conveyor, a crane that tips over, trash that catches fire, a car wreck, a slip on ice.
If the signs were present, why didn’t someone catch them?
Actions in the final hours before virtually any high-consequence incident (in aviation, the nuclear industry, oil and chemical processing industries, etc.) are connected to so-called upstream organization issues: management decisions gone wrong, corporate hubris, maintenance cuts. Those are often easier to document with a paper trail of emails, etc. than what went down in the final hours. That can be shrouded in an invisible fog of botched communications and misunderstandings, much to the frustration of professionals looking for answers.