Gulf Oil Spill Top Kill
Let us all hope that BP has finally been successful in halting the most significant oil spill in U.S. history. It’s interesting to follow the recent media coverage which seems to be shifting to a much less vitriolic view of the incident. While we shouldn’t hang BP in effigy over this tragedy, we need to remain diligent in our disdain, continuing to ask the questions “How could this have happened? What have we learned from this? and What will we do differently in the future?” Certainly, we need to improve the safeguards and monitoring when drilling deep oil wells. We also need much better disaster preparedness. But will this be enough to safeguard our environment and justify continued oil exploration in the gulf?
By itself, I feel the answer is no. However, as engineers on the cutting edge of technological advances, we sometimes learn more from our failures than our successes. There is a lot to learn from this incident. I hope that the engineering profession as well as the U.S. government stay closely involved in the study of the incident, the response, and aftermath as well as the anticipated protracted litigation. There will be many “nuggets” of knowledge that we can recognize and apply to advance our understanding of how to do a better job, or we can ignore these “nuggets” and be destined to re-live these failures another time.