Re: Times-Picayune Editorial entitaled robe on how drilling moratorium was decided is welcome: An editorial August 2, 2010
The Times-Picayune editorial staff is again displaying its profound ignorance of good science and engineering by continuing to endorse the hip-shot conclusions of Dr. Bea's narrowly "targeted" recommended measures for ensuring that its safe to drill. Implementing all of these fixes as discrete, unintegrated projects will not render deep water drilling adequately safer that it was before the blowout.
According to the scientists' communication with Louisiana politicians on the 7th of June they concluded that "The tradgedy had very specific causes." That finding assures us that there was no systemic problem with a complex chain of, as they call it, "improbable" evens. Isn't that what the Corps of Engineers initially concluded about Katrina?
What the scientists and drilling advocates need to do is to look at the lessons learned from Katrina. The Corps' Interagency Performance Evaluation Team (IPET) concluded after several years (not months) that the Hurricane Protection Systems around New Orleans was a "system in name only" and for it to be safe it would have to become a comprehensive, fully integrated, system. Recent research in systems engineering indicates that it is highly unlikely that a system will be resilient unless it is a well-formed system and low frequency, high consequence risks like blow outs and levee failure are further enhanced with aditional systematic resilience measures to protect populations and their protective ecology.
As far as I can determined, the scientists have not yet asked the question "Was the deepwater horizon a system in more than just name?" From my perspective, I will continue to assess my flood risks as significantly higher than they were as a result of damaged caused healthy wind and storm surge-defeating wetlands.
I wish some one would help me quantify that risk.
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