Never Murphy's Law Disdain

THE CENTURION CHRONICLE
Special Issue – Jun 2010

NEVER MURPHY’S LAW DISDAIN
(it will kick your ass if you do – every time)

With any inherently dangerous enterprises such as coal mining and deep-ocean oil drilling, one should never Murphy’s Law disdain. It’s an immutable one, and it will always kick your ass if you do so.

BP’s deep drilling project in the Gulf of Mexico is a prime example of that. The very negative PR and the severity of the financial impacts of the situation are only just beginning to kick its corporate ass, and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come.

What’s apparent here is that BP, for all of its expertise and hard-earned experience with such projects, failed to have effective contingency measures ready to activate against such an eventuality, thereby allowing Murphy to strike with his usual style of catastrophic frenzy, just to remind BP of that failure.

One of the contingency measures that should have been considered, before any drilling even began, was how, and with what means could such an event be contained to limit its polluting spread. A consideration that’s especially important in a marine environment, even more than on dry land. Understandably, however, BP’s immediate focus was how to stop the resulting gushing outflow of oil and gas from that damaged well head. Containing its spread was secondary to that objective. Meanwhile, the ever expanding volume of oil grew, and grew, and grew, into the monstrous ameba-like blob drifting in the Gulf’s waters today.

And in all these weeks that have passed since this began, it’s also very apparent that BP is not the only one at fault for being without contingency plans for this kind of situation. From the office of our ass-kicking President, on down, nothing was done to immediately mobilize an effective system of in depth defensive measures to protect the shores of the most likely state to be impacted by this event. Even a fifth-grader could have understood, and foreseen, that with such a volume of oil pouring out into the water, inevitably, it would reach those shores.

But the mindset of our government’s bureaucracies, not to mention that of our elected officials, seems to have been – since BP was the source of the problem, everyone should wait and see how and what it would do about it. So, a multitude of “joint” local, state, and federal conferences, nit-picking arguments about jurisdictional responsibilities, and PR gavottes by the score, were the only actions taken. A more glaring example of paralysis from analysis would be hard to find.

We may fault BP for its errors in handling such a catastrophic event, but, our own government authorities are even more at fault for their limp-biscuit reaction to it. To be blunt about it, the moment BP’s floating rig caught fire, exploded, and sank, every level of our government should have been mobilized for the counter-measures that would be needed to protect those shores. It should have done so with no delay or hesitation, while telling BP to concentrate its efforts on capping and staunching the outflow of oil from that damaged well, as the government handled any containment and clean up efforts needed, and for which, it would send the bill for those efforts to BP later.

Unfortunately, such a common sense approach didn’t happen, and as a result thousands of folks’ livelihoods in Louisianan, Mississippi, Alabama, and now Florida, are in dire jeopardy, and actually, may never recover. Thus the negative economic consequences of such delay and inaction, on these states, will thus linger on for a long time also. All of this because our government sat on its collective asses arguing about who should be doing what, just as it did during the Katrina event, instead of taking immediate action.

So to now hear our President’s and our politicians’ sanctimonious cries of outrage about BP’s failures, would seem laughable, if their hypocrisy about their own failure were not so outrageous.

The question all boils down to this: Who’s to do the ass-kicking whenever our government fails us so miserably?

Well, perhaps the answer will be….we the people will do that ass-kicking….next November.

CENTURION