Now, my current major is Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. This is a field where people, including myself, generally dislike government regulation. There are numerous domestic and international regulators who write up shipping and shipbuilding requirements, and they often come up with irritating, contradictory regulations. However, it is also generally recognized that government regulation is necessary to an extent because otherwise there would be abuses that would lead to major issues (environmental, safety, etc.) in the course of trying to make a profit. And a lot of these abuses wouldn't even be malicious. Instead, they would just happen as people made general assumptions that highly improbable things wouldn't happen. And 99 times out of 100, they would be right and nothing bad would happen. But on rare occasions, such assumptions would be wrong and the result would be catastrophic.

Take, for instance, the BP Oil Spill. We may never really know the exact causes of the spill or exactly who is to blame (BP recently released their report in which they unsurprisingly placed a lot of the blame on Haliburton and Transocean). However, public hearings and inquiries have brought to light the general framework of what happened:

1. An accident prior to the major event causing the spill took place and caused the rubber seals on the blowout preventer to break.

2. The broken seals on the blowout preventer led pressure tests on the well to give unusually low readings.

3. The engineers overseeing the project concluded that the well was a low pressure well. As they had drilled an exploratory well, they needed to seal it off. Since they assumed that the well was low pressure, they decided to use less sealant than regulations demanded (probably because they were over-budget).

4. The well was not, in fact, a low pressure well. In fact, it was a ridiculously high pressure well. As such, the oil broke through the sealant once other forms of support were removed (I'm not going to go in to a lengthy explanation of how oil wells work), and overwhelmed the damaged blowout preventer.

5. The surging oil then overwhelmed several other systems (which it shouldn't have been able to do) and wound up on the rig itself. At this point, it was inevitable that it would ignite. When it did, 11 people died and oil flowed freely into the Gulf. The rest should be known to everyone here.