Gulf Oil Spill: “Couldas,” “Shouldas”

Rules of engagement for the oil sector

What are the root and contributing causes of the accident in the Gulf? What could have and should have been done to prevent the accident? If the potential for the accident could not have been absolutely prevented, what could have and should have been done to mitigate the consequences of such an accident? And if actions were taken, why were they apparently not taken effectively? The nation deserves and still awaits answers to these questions.

Any enterprise that is engaged in activities with the potential for public and employee harm should be required to develop and implement quality and risk management systems to prevent events with intolerable effects. Such management systems would focus on analyzing the quality of hardware and process designs.

One such analytical system is failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), which is particularly useful in analyzing the design quality of a hardware item—such as a blowout preventer. A short and simplistic description of the analytical method is as follows:

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Comments

Hindsight

There is a fundamental question that has not been answered: Was the explosion and subsequent deaths and spill the result of common cause variation or special cause variation? More than likely, from a macroscopic view, it was common cause variation - built into the system. Perhaps, at a microscopic (local) level, special cause(s) occurred. We may never know. In either case, the witch hunt that is going on is inappropriate. Once the event occurred, the priorities should be: 1. STOP the leak, and 2. Minimize the damage already done. Both should be persued at all costs. Unfortunately, our government has not taken this approach; after all "a good crisis should never go to waste (politically)"!
While history is strewn with oil disasters both accidental (Exxon Valdez) and purposeful (Sadam Hussein and the Gulf War), safety of oil rigs is probably at least a 6 Sigma process with less than 3.4 dpmo when one considers the number of oil rigs in the world's oceans and the number of years drilling has been occurring off-shore.
We could use the technique of the "5 Why's": Why are companies drilling in over a mile of water? Because environmental activists have caused regulations to push oil rigs farther and farther out to sea. Why? Because we don't want to have to look at oil rigs...ad infinitum.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and to suggest that FMEA's and other techniques should have been used to prevent this disaster is just another look in the rearview mirror. How many FMEA's could be performed per oil rig? 10? 100? 1000? Disasters are not predictable other than we know they are going to happen (Black Swan theory). All inanimate objects obey all laws of nature at all times. Humans do not. As long as we are dealing with human beings, mistakes (either by omission or comission) will be made and disasters will happen.
I know... Let's get together and brainstorm a cure for cancer!!!