An Oily Response

When safety becomes an operational liability to a company rather than the chief goal, you get a climate where reporting safety violations only makes you responsible for causing them.  Case in point:  Deepwater Horizon.

A confidential report on safety conditions aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, conducted about one month before the rig's explosion, points to widespread fear of reprisal for reporting employee mistakes that could undermine safety aboard the rig.

"There was a stated fear of reprisal related specifically to the reporting of dropped objects," states an executive summary of the report obtained by CNN.

"Only 46.3 percent of participants felt that, if their actions led to a potentially risky situation (e.g., forgetting to do something, damaging equipment, dropping an object from height), they could report it without any fear of reprisal," the report states.

Transocean, the rig operator, commissioned the survey of about 40 employees, about half its staff aboard the Deepwater Horizon.

The report concluded, "Deepwater Horizon was relatively strong in many of the core aspects of safety management." But it also uncovered fear among workers of suffering reprisal for reporting conditions that could lead to a "risky" situation onboard the rig.

The study also found some Transocean employees entered fake data to try to circumvent a safety system, according to a person familiar with the full report.

But remember, there's no evidence that the kind of safety violations and institutionalized denial that produced a toxic catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is in anyway widespread to any other rigs, and there's no reason to worry whatsoever about the safety records at other drilling locations and wells.  No reason to enforce that mean ol' moratorium on drilling.  Give us a second to lock it down.  Everything's fine here.  How are you?

It's not like we should be asking "Who else is hiding safety violations on these rigs because they fear reprisals?" or anything smart like that while Tropical Storm Bonnie threatens to plow into all that surface oil and Corexit dispersant and carry it possibly hundreds of miles inland smack into the heart of the Great Plains states.  Instead, we should drill baby drill!