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    Who are the NERD fund donors Mr Snyder?

    Raise the curtain.

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    Case Example: BP (none / 0) (#34)
    by Seth9 on Sun Sep 19, 2010 at 11:52:46 AM EST
    As my workload has increased significantly recently, I haven't had time to post a whole lot on this matter. And I see that several people here have questioned my assertion that government regulation is an unfortunate necessity in numerous industries. So I'm going to try to address as many thoughts as I can in this post. If I miss yours, then I'm sorry, but as I'm in the minority here and I'm under the time constraints of being an engineering student who's behind on his workload, I'm not going to be able to address them all.

    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.

    Now, had BP and co. observed safety regulations, this disaster could have been stopped at every step on this list. But they didn't. And they are definitely paying a price in the market. They may even go under as a result of this spill. However, this won't undo the massive damage that has already been done.

    And it should be noted that the BP guys weren't making decisions that were all too reckless. The spill only happened because a ton of systems failed, any of which would have not been a major issue in it of itself. It was a series of minor errors and oversights that led to the spill, rather than one colossal mistake. In fact, if I were in charge of that rig, I could see myself making a lot of those same mistakes, if there were no regulations forcing me to do otherwise. But there are regulations and while many are poorly formed or useless, as a whole they exist to stop engineers from making a series of minor miscues that could lead to calamity. And that is why I think that government regulations are a necessary evil.

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