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.
Two other people on this forum (that I know of), myself being one of them, are aware of the slew of regulations within Title 46 of the CFRs. I have 72 days in the engine room on a river boat, and the other person has their Third Assistant Unlimited license.
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
One day in Steam Class, one of my engineering profs at GLMA basically said the higher you run the efficiency of a steam plant, the more on top of things your crew has to be, because those higher efficiencies mean your plant can self destruct if the engineer on watch and/or the QMED (and whoever else is working in the engine room at the time) isn't on top of things. If a chief knows his people can't handle it, he'll make things less efficient so that there's a time buffer for the crew to react.
This is perfectly analogous to regulation.
Regulation imposes inefficiencies. Assumption being to insert a safety factor. But then the question should be asked: Why should the government be establishing arbitrary (there, I said it) safety factors? Certainly if the goal was to eliminate all hazard, the government would restrict highway travel to 25MPH for example, but they don't. Why not? It's an arbitrary regulation, as people go above (or far above) that sort of regulation all the time, and it doesn't automatically mean a crash.
Then of course there are all the aviation regulations (I'm a pilot) that I get to deal with that jack up the cost of that particular endeavor.
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.
Ok, so you would agree then that it's all a statistics game, correct?
As I said above, who is it for the government to determine the regulations that establish an arbitrary statistical failure rate? If you don't think it's arbitrary, then what should that failure rate be, and how would you argue that should be it? Why not more? Why not less?
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.
Maybe, maybe not. Who knows. Anything mechanical can break - you should know that.
Also, mere existence of regulations doesn't stop anything. Would you advocate having a government agent aboard every vessel or rig 24/7 to ensure 100% compliance? If not, what good do regulations do if they can be ignored?
As for damage caused and remedies, that's exactly what the court system is there for. BP may have messed up, and if that's the case and can be proven in court, that is the appropriate way to handle it - not further regulation because they couldn't handle it.
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.
You just said it - they weren't acting reckless. BP got boned, more or less because when the dice were thrown, it happened to roll the number that matched the compound probability. Compound probability should be something that they taught in whatever entry level engineering courses you've taken.
So for an example in this case, we assume 5 systems (included are those of whatever accident you reference that affected the BOP seals) that failed to ultimately lead to the explosion/fire/leak.
Assume failure probabilities of these systems are .2, .15, .35, .25, and .05.
The compounded failure rate for all five systems is 0.013% Obviously, I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass, but it's to make a point that the more systems you have, the significantly reduced chance that all of them will fail, leading to catastrophic results, even if they have relatively high individual failure rates - I mean seriously, a 35% failure rate for an item.
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
Would the regulations actually force you to do otherwise if you reasonably thought you could get away with it, or would it require some government regulatory gestapo agent that would force you to do otherwise? Regulations are merely words on paper.
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.
Those many poorly formed and useless regulations in the aggregate should lead you to the opposite conclusion.
If a company can run the razors edge of efficiency and pull it off, who is it for you, myself, or the government to say otherwise. If they try, fail, and harm you or myself, then that's what the courts are for.
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