[Vo]:BP had 760 violations while Exxon had only 1

[Jed Rothwell]

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show quoted an interview 
with BP managing director Bob Dudley, conducted 
by George Stephanopoulos. Apparently, in the last 
3 years, BP's facilities have been cited by OSHA 
for "760 egregious, willful safety violations." This compares to:

Sunoco 8
ConocoPhillips 8
Citago 2
Exxon 1
See:

http://www.columbusalive.com/live/content/features/stories/2010/06/03/the-daily-show-the-spilling-fields.html

This does not surprise me. When you look into the 
history of severe industrial accidents and 
catastrophes such as the Titanic sinking, the 
Challenger explosion, and the accidents at Three 
Mile Island or Brown's Ferry, you usually find 
precursor events such as smaller accidents or 
close calls. You find incompetence or criminal 
mismanagement. You might say that accidents don't happen by accident.

Here is an example of a close-call that should 
never have happened, and an example of muddled 
thinking in upper management. Before the 
Challenger exploded, the o-rings on the Space 
Shuttle tank partially eroded in previous 
launches, something they were never expected to 
do, or designed to do. Quoting Feynman, "What Do 
You Care What Other People Think?," p. 244:

. . . in flight 51-C, it was noted that the 
erosion depth was only one-third of the radius. 
It had been noted in an experiment cutting the 
ring that cutting it as deep as one radius was 
necessary before the ring failed. Instead of 
being very concerned that varia­tions of poorly 
understood conditions might reasonably create a 
deeper erosion this time, it was asserted there was "a safety factor of three."

This is a strange use of the engineer's term 
"safety factor." If a bridge is built to 
withstand a certain load with­out the beams 
permanently deforming, cracking, or break­ing, it 
may be designed for the materials used to 
actually stand up under three times the load. 
This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain 
excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or 
weaknesses in the material that might have 
unex­pected flaws, et cetera. But if the expected 
load comes on to the new bridge and a crack 
appears in a beam, this is a failure of the 
design. There was no safety factor at all, even 
though the bridge did not actually collapse 
because the crack only went one-third of the way 
through the beam. The O-rings of the solid rocket 
boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was 
a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not 
something from which safety could be inferred.

There was no way, without full understanding, 
that one could have confidence that conditions 
the next time might not produce erosion three 
times more severe than the time before. 
Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into 
thinking they had such understanding and 
confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations 
from case to case. A mathematical model was made 
to calculate erosion. This was a model based not 
on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting. . . ."


[This gives empirical curve fitting a bad name . . .]

- Jed