'Culture of complacency' ruled at companies, oil spill panel's co-chairman says

[kristopher]

'Culture of complacency' ruled at companies, oil spill panel's co-chairman says
William K. Reilly, co-chair of the panel investigating the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the subsequent oil spill, says 'a suite of bad decisions' by BP, Transocean and Halliburton had been uncovered.

A stream of evidence shows that "a culture of complacency" rather than a "culture of safety" prevailed at BP, Transocean and Halliburton as they worked on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, according to one of the chairmen of the presidential commission investigating the April 20 gulf oil spill.

William K. Reilly, who was EPA administrator under President George H.W. Bush, said that the panel's investigators had uncovered "a suite of bad decisions," many still inexplicable, involving tests that were poorly run, alarming test results that were ignored, proper equipment sidelined, and safety barriers that were removed at the high-pressure well prematurely.

"Each company is responsible for one or more egregiously bad decision," Reilly said in opening comments on Tuesday.

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the other co-chair of the panel, agreed: "Leaders did not take serious risks seriously enough and did not identify a risk that proved to be fatal."

Their blunt assessment ...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-commission-20101110,0,7355018.story

This is an inevitable outcome in a complex system. No matter how carefully you plan to avoid or deal with failure, if you give us long enough, there will be a subversion of even the best planning by greed, laziness, incompetence, boredom, and irresponsible behavior wearing ten thousand different faces.