The BP Gulf Disaster

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I'm not blatantly missing the point; you need to wakeup and smell the coffee: You can't compare regulation in the UK with here in the US. They are different. While I'm not that familiar with what Shos is commenting on, this is a different situation entirely. You tell me who these guys on the rig, 40 miles out in the Gulf, can complain to, such as the decision to replace the mud with seawater. Go ahead, and I'll wait.

 

Ragusa,

I'm sure there are some things that can be done to help with the cleanup. My point is twofold: 1) The oil companies are probably one of the industries best equipped to deal with oil spills and 2) The oil companies are likely the ONLY industry capable of sealing the well - especially one a mile down in the ocean.

 

1) Oil industry is a broad term. Oil (extraction) companies are not equipped to do oil relief because that's not what they earn money with. In the name of buzzwords like 'shareholder interest' or 'lean company' and 'concentration on core business' they will limit their respective capabilities only to the extent legally absolutely necessary. If the law doesn't oblige them to have the capabilities, they will happily save money by not having such a capability. I don't expect the US to have such laws, any more that is.

Thus, with overwhelming probability oil (extraction) companies have outsourced oil recovery, oil well intervention and emergency response - if they ever possessed such a wing. I remember the famous Red Adair having made a living of that. For cleanup oil (extraction) companies thus rely on contractors. That means you'll find the expertise for cleanup with service providers like Halliburton or Adair's company. I see no reason why nobody but an oil company can hire such a service provider.

2) You can take the self-interest out by having the authorities task a competitor or service providers with sealing the well, and forcing the lapsing company to pay for it (the idea: If you won't do it, or fail, someone else will have to do it and you pay: You broke it, you pay for fixing it. That's what we call the 'Verursacherprinzip', the principle that someone who creates a danger (keyword: 'Störer') pays for removing it. That's standard in administrative law in Germany (keyword 'Ersatzvornahme') for cases of oil contamination of soil). As far as I am concerned they can shove their business interest up their ass as soon as a the public safety is endangered, even more so if the extent of the accident is of a magnitude as in this case. Since there obviously, with the oil continuing to spill, is an imminent danger for the public safety, the authorities are more than allowed, mandated, to intervene.

Their financial self interest would then drive oil (extraction) companies to avoid accidents to protect their business secrets and to avoid having to finance their competitors, not to mention the fines. That, with vigorously enforcing safety standards and regulation, would be my approach.

 

NOG, my wife blew the whistle regarding a much smaller matter, and her "anonymity" lasted about one day. On a more serious matter, you can bet it would last an even shorter time. In addition, suing a behemoth like BP would be a lose/lose situation. You could spend 10 years in court and still never see any compensation. That's the nature of modern courts. Even if you won, the time wasted and the stress suffered would not be worth the socio/emotional costs. It's easy for people to say "they should have taken the hit for principle's sake" but when your livelihood is on the line I don't think it's fair to make such a statement.

 

Worse, I'm thinking of oppressive clauses (like the famous one forcing KBR employees to go through internal arbitration for any work related disputes, like about ... uhm ... rape in the workplace). I fully expect such contracts to include comparably unfair provisions, and items like confidentiality clauses - and fines for violations.

Not only would the anonymity not last long, the odds are that the whistle blower would soon see himself out of his job (with a reputation making it hard to find a new job ... word gets around), but also sued by his former employer for violating the confidentiality agreement in his contract.

On the plus side: Most of that (except for confidentiality agreements and fines) would probably be illegal (keyword 'sittenwidrig', which roughly translates as unethical/ indecent) under German law

 

Is there any legal precedent that says a confidentiality clause can ovveride the law? As in

"Bill works for Omnicorp. He signed a confidentiality agreement saying he would never speak to anyone about what happens at Omnicorp. One night, Bill was at work and saw his boss Tim rape and murder Violet, the office manager. Being a good person, Bill went to the cops and told them about what Tim did. Omnicorp sued Bill and won, because according to the confidentiality clause, he had no right to tell anyone about what happened at the Omnicorp headquarters."

I know that doesn't sound even remotely logical, but when dealing with the courts, I have very little faith in their logic or morality.

 

Ragusa,

I think our disagreement is more a semantic than substantive one. I agree that oil comapnies likely contract out oil cleanup to other companies. The reason I think it's OK to let the oil companies do the cleanup is because they likely already have these contractors on retainer. Sure, there's nothing preventing the government or other industry from hiring them, but if BP has already made the investment for their services, they have the capability, and thus having the government spend money on it is redundant.

As for tasking another company with sealing the well, the only other company capable of doing this would likely be another oil company. Congress has already investigated this, and we got no takers. Do we have any reason to believe, especially after the admission from the Exxon/Mobile CEO that, "We would be ill-equipped to deal with such a problem", that a company like Exxon/Mobile, Shell, et. al., would be able to do a better job than BP?

This whole issue just sucks balls. I cannot believe that any nation would allow oil drilling in an area where there's not a mitigation plan on the books if something goes wrong. And this isn't unique to BP. When Congress called in all the oil company CEOs to the Capitol last week, a large part of that was to find out if there was a technology possessed by other oil companies that could stem the flow of oil that far down in the ocean.

While the other CEOs took their turns throwing BP under the bus, saying that they would never cut the corners BP did, and how they would have done things differently, there answer to the question at hand was essentially a shrug of the shoulders. Look at the Exxon/Mobile CEO's quote again: "We would be ill-equipped to deal with such a problem". That roughly translates to, "If this happened to us, we'd be up the creek just as much as BP is."

 

Two separate issues: criminal law and civil law. Your example is about criminal conduct, and I cannot imagine that a (civil law) confidentiality agreement can trump the obligation to obey criminal laws or to report crimes.

Mind that in most cases it wouldn't be about crimes, but merely about leaking internal i.e. confidential information about procedures and information about facts or chains of events or giving testimony that might adversely affect the company's position in litigation and the like. Precisely that is the stuff however that whistle blowing is usually about.

I can imagine a company, if it is vindictive, to sue an employee over the technicality of him having violated the letter of his confidentiality agreement in his contract, and that may well be decided in favour of the company.

As an illustration for how ruthless companies can be: KBR still (!) holds that the rape of Mrs. Jones by her co-workers was work related and thus has to undergo arbitration - and since it happened in Iraq US criminal law didn't apply (at the time, iirc it has since been corrected). They are fighting the poor woman for four or five years now.

 

Absolutely. And don't think they won't try to throw you under the bus. Here's a true story, that I can't give real specifics on it because it is a company matter and much of it is confidential:

A guy is out on the floor driving heavy equipment that he is not checked out on. He is a transfer to a new store. As soon as the old store finds out they call and tell the management team at the new store that the employee is not certified to drive the equipment. The new store igonres the information but emails are sent everyone at the old store plays CYA. The employee in question is out on the sales floor just a few days later and runs flat over a customer. Emails are deleted, company documents are destroyed by the new store and middle management outside the store and everyone tells the corporate lawyers that they knew nothing about it. The customer, an elderly man, who is crippled for life, wins a multi-million dollar settlement. He was hard of hearing and did not hear the equipment operating so close to him, but the dirver ran right over him nevertheless, ignoring company policy that equipment was not to be driven with customers in the area. The fact is that the store it happened at claimed they thought he was certified, when clearly they knew he wasn't and even though middle-management outside the store was notified (because the old store played CYA pretty well), the documentation was destroyed. And no one, I mean no one, seemed to know anything.

My point is that even when people try to do the right thing, there are always breakdowns in the chain. A company can try to regulate itself, have good policy in place, and still this kind of stuff goes on. The employee in question? Still with the company. What good is regulation, corporate or government, if some people don't care enough to follow it? And it seems that everyone is concerned with keeping their jobs, regardless.

 

Before I am off to watch football, I'll gently provide you a way back to topic with this downer BP yanks containment cap after problem, oil flows unimpeded into the Gulf.

 

Well, my point is that it's counterproductive to claim that government is just "corrupt," "all coporations" fail to do the right thing because of greed, "management is incompetent and sucks" and the average worker is "just lazy." We should focus on the specifics regarding BP and this event. There is a lot that government can do if it is funded and has the manpower to do the job; corporations have different cultures, some of which are concerned with doing the right thing; some management is very competent and cares about saftey, and there are workers who perform well and do a great job but still have concerns about saftey issues that they witness. But the focus should be on the specifics of this event, IMHO.

Above all, individuals who make careless decisions need to be held accountable for them.

 

The US's only experience is with the Valdez spill, and that was really a very different circumstance. It was a lot of oil, yes, but concentrated in a small, cold, low-energy ecosystem. Here, the environment the spill is happening in is completely different, and that makes a lot of differences. Of course, we could use all the help we could get, if Obama would let it in.

 

NOG,
your argument isn't fully thought through: Even when the environments are different, that does by no means mean that lessons from the Exxon Valdez spill can't be transferred to the Deepwater Horizon spill. More than that: If anything, the devastation Exxon Valdez has brought to a cold, low-energy ecosystem ought to have given ample reason to analyse what would happen in a warm, high-energy ecosystem, and to plan accordingly - especially so in light of the emergence of off-shore oil extraction in the Gulf of Mexico.

There were numerous smaller spills over the last five decades that would have allowed to draw lessons. In 1979 there was a devastating oil spill off Mexico - the Ixtoc I oil spill - right there in the Bay of Campeche in the Gulf Of Mexico, which amply illustrated the characteristics of oil spills in, as you put it, a warm, high-energy ecosystem.

Probably close enough to notice (hey, Cancun was right around the corner!), but then, probably already ancient history, and south-of-the-border as well. Only enviro-hysterics have that long memories, and these nattering nabobs of negativity only remember the bad parts. They never mention the good parts about the oil spills

Plenty of precedent to learn from. And plenty of time. After all, under Murphy's law - what can go wrong will go wrong at some point - q.e.d. ...

 

Not to get too nitpicky, but what do we exactly mean by "low energy" here? It certainly gets cold up in Alaska, but the waters off the Alaskan coast are among the most productive in the world. As far as oceanic life goes, there's at least as much up off the Alaskan coast as there is in the Gulf.

 

Just to make sure: You are asking NOG about the 'cold, low-energy ecosystem'

 

I suppose the question is most directly posed to NOG, but if anyone else wishes to answer, I'm not limiting the question just to him.

When looking at marine ecosystems, temperature is typically not the most significant characteristic in determining how productive the waters are - it's usually proximity to the coast. In fact, the seas around Alaska are among the most productive fishing areas in the world.

This is very different from most terrestrial ecosystems, where the most productive areas are temperate and tropical areas that support forests/jungles.

I was stressing that if by "low-energy ecosystem" you mean it's cold up there, OK. But if you are implying Alaska is a "low-energy ecosystem" to be interpreted as a lack or biodiversity or productivity, I disagree.

 

I thought he meant the amount of tropical storms that the Gulf is prone to. If there is any kind of tropical storm in the nothern gulf, it could become a far worse situation - depending on the direction of the storm -- and we are in hurricane season....

 

I had not interpreted his comment that way, but if that's what he meant, then I have no disagreement with him.

 

I just found something interesting at fact check. There have been several un-countered assertions in this thread that Obama actually declined foreign help with the cleanup. Apparently, this isn't actually true. So far, five offers have been accepted and only one, an offer from France, was declined. France offered a chemical dispersant that is not approved for use in the United States.

http://factcheck.org/2010/06/oil-spill-foreign-help-and-the-jones-act/

 

Oh, I'll agree that an on-spot emergency complaint wouldn't do any good, but then they usually don't. These problems had apparently been going on for some time now, though. These people don't spend their entire lives on the rigs, you know. They do get shore time. With internet access. And cell phones.

This is an excellent point, and an excellent idea. The principle isn't without precedence in the US, though the process is generally a little different. Sadly, I doubt anyone will listen to it.

Wow, what field did she work in? Who did she report to (i.e. in-house or gov't)?

We may be talking about two different things, but I always though whistle-blowing was about violations of federal/state regulations and/or blatant violations of people's safety. I.e. exactly what BP did. That definitely trumps confidentiality agreements, and there are federal laws protecting the whistleblower from corporate reprisals.

Oh, yes, it serves as a warning, but not a lesson on the particulars. There should have been a plan in place, tested and prepared for, I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just saying the Exxon situation and this are different enough that what didn't work there may work wonderfully here, and vice versa.

I think the South of the Border, thing is the critical part. Everyone knows that could never happen here. Even if it is the same companies working in both places. And the same people. With the same equipment.
...

I call it low-energy because the worst long-term impacts were on the beaches. The high productivity comes from migratory patterns, which blend north/south with temporal regions and take the best of each. The microbes on the beaches, however, are definitely low-energy. And no, I didn't mean weather-energy, though that does add a nasty twist into things.

Wow, I'm surprised MSNBC hasn't run with this. Thanks for the info.