BP – Katrina
There are many who are drawing comparisons between George W Bush’s debacle in the response to Hurricane Katrina, and President Obama’s handling of the on-going BP oil disaster. The BP incident appears to have been a serious of human errors which lead to an inadequate safety culture and outright misjudgements in the drilling and start-up process. on the other hand, Katrina was a natural disasters that was magnified by under maintained levies. The questions should be, “what could have been done to prevent these incidents, and once they occurred, what could have been done to resolve them?
History is reasonably clear about Katrina. The Bush Administration practiced their ideological belief that Government was an impediment to progress and had gutted the government agencies whose role was to respond to natural disasters. In addition the Bush team had diverted Corp of Engineers funds from levy maintenance. The results, once the Hurricane struck New Orleans, were easy to predict.
The Obama Administration made a similar but fundamentally different mistake. In their relatively short time in office (17 months), the White House felt comfortable in overall statistics and did not try to understand the process that produces the good statistics.
There are a lot of drilling rigs in the Gulf, and there are some that are producing at similar depths as the BP rig. The Obama team reasoned that good results must mean the Industry knew what they were doing.
Good results result from good processes followed each and every time.
The Government has concluded that it is in the US national interest to continue drilling in off shore waters. Given that, the Obama Administration must change the regulatory climate and insist that oil explorers follow strict guidelines when drilling. The government must also have the means to verify that the process guidelines are in fact being followed. There is no room for the Bush Administration’s “less government”, and the Obama view that “government is good” is equally useless unless government in fact performs.
With Obama’s view there is hope, with Bush there is not.
This entry was posted on May 28, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, George Bush, Politics, Republican Party. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: bp, bp oil disaster, katrina, new orleans, regulatory actions
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