Comment on: Scientists point to better way to safer drilling: An editorial

I have the profoundest respect and admiration for Bob Bea but I'm afraid he and his team have missed the major root cause and the proven solution.

The Corps' IPET took several years to figure out that the root cause of the Katrina failures was that our flood protection system was a "system in name only" and that to ensure the future safety of all the flood protection stakeholders, the flood protection systems (in name only) had to turn it into a real system with high integrity and resilience. Unfortunately those lessons have been rejected by the Corps, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and our local levee boards who explicitly refuse to use a systems engineering approach

Dr Bea's team has given us a laundry list of specific actions some of which have some very imprecise measures of success such as sufficient, comprehensive, and effective. They suggest fixing the specific defects in operators safety cultures in the short term. That shows a poor understanding of how difficult and time-consuming it is to change a culture that lionizes risk takers to one that puts safety first.

But the bigest fault of the team is its failure to identify or promote a total systems approach as the most important and essential ingredient in creating even a modestly resilient off-shore drilling technology and its supporting life-cycle culture. Recent research into the discipline of resilience systems engineering has established that, in the face of low frequency-high consequence risks, resilience can never be achieve without a fully integrated systems solution driven by a deep understanding of the risks that confront all stakeholders. This includes the interests of residents of New Orleans who have seen the barriers to high winds and storm surges substantially (but unquantifiably) diminished by the spill.

Will BP establish a Road Home Program when our polluted wetlands are inevitably unable to protect ourselves and our homes?

I firmly support Bea's long term recommendation, enhanced with best systems engineering practices such as systems architecting, interface management, stakeholder focus, to name a few, as a minimally acceptable state to permit continued high risk offshore drilling.

Posted on Scientists point to better way to safer drilling: An editorial on July 31, 2010, 2:57PM