Comment on: Robert Dudley, incoming CEO of BP, sees long road ahead

We now know that the moratorium will last considerably longer because BP's leadership still thinks in terms accidents not science or best practices.

The accidents Dudley is talking about are low consequence slips and falls rather than the high consequences of multiple deaths along with economic, environmental and cultural devastation that accompanies major blow-outs and spills in our waters. What he and government stewards should be saying is that so long as there is a remote chance of an high consequence devestation, he will NOT drill.

If BP had any sense, they would be following the Dutch flood water strategy of putting safety first and using a systems approach which is the only repeatable way of protecting against these kinds of risks. I would suspect that were anyone to examine the BP design and operation from a systems perspective, they, like the Corps of Engineers after Katrina, would find that BP's deepwater operations were a "system in name only"

There is an emerging subdiscipline within systems engineering called resilience systems engineering that has examined the Columbia shuttle disaster and Katrina, among othes, and found that you can actually design, build and operate a systems with resilience at a level comensurate with the actual risk and consequences of hurricanes- and oil drilling-induced catastrophes.

So long as BP and others believe that accidents "just happen" and the tooth fairy, it will be unsafe to drill in deep water. It's time to start transforming the way corporations and citizens think. That's a whole lot harder than buying a few tools.

Posted on Robert Dudley, incoming CEO of BP, sees long road ahead on July 28, 2010, 9:37AM