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September 8, 2010

The BP oil rig disaster

A presentation in the Global maritime Congress 2010 by Clay Maitland about the cause of the BP oil rig disaster mentions the following:
What were the underlying causes of the disaster?
• Complacency and routinism; the tendency of those within a large organisation to avoid testing established policies.
• “Bean-counteritis”; a failure to examine constraints on risk management budgets.
• Collectivism; a conviction that existing company policy is, by definition, the best that could possibly be. In American parlance, this is often called “drinking the company Kool-Aid.” It entails a rejection of rigourous analysis of internal management systems,and their appraisal for possible deficiencies.
• A failure, from top to bottom, to subject these systems to outside scrutiny, in the manner of the International Maritime Organisation’s Member State Audit Scheme.
• A tendency to stigmatise concern for the environment as something repugnantly radical, “Greenpeace Socialism”, “tree-hugging”, etc.
• Most significantly, the failure to establish a risk control or safety awareness mindset at all levels of the corporate hierarchy,particularly at middle-management levels, and to effectively offset a “get it done, at the lowest possible cost” attitude at the “coalface”.

Read the full presentation in this link

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