What are your views on the current BP oil crisis? Do you feel it coud have been handled better?

Question: What are your views on the current BP oil crisis? Do you feel it coud have been handled better?

Asked by jpriestley to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
- Andrew Maynard answered on 23 Jun 2010:
  
  Hi jpriestly,
  
  I absolutely feel it could have not only been handled better, but probably avoided, or at least minimized! This a huge topic, and I’ll try not to bore you rigid by ranting on. But very briefly, BP claimed to be a responsible company that were doing everything to ensure human and environmental safety, they were using a new technology that was largely untested and was beyond the reach of direct intervention if anything went wrong, *yet they didn’t bother to put strong contingency plans in place, despite the plausible likelihood of a catastrophic failure!* A huge, huge fail!
  
  What they should have been doing is thinking about every way the technology might have gone wrong – even the “one in a million” possibilities – and investing in safeguards to prevent these things happening, and technologies to deal with the consequences of something awful did happen.
  
  They could never have prevented a disaster 100%. But they could have ensured the chances of something happening were lower, and that they were prepared to deal with anything that did go wrong.
  
  Instead, they put money first, while telling everyone they were being responsible.
  
  End of rant!!
- anon answered on 23 Jun 2010:
  
  Hello jp,
  
  I don’t know much about this issue. It’s being discussed at work a lot. It seems BP are pouring all their resources into sorting it out now but I guess the question is about whether shoddy working practices allowed it to happen in the first place.
  
  The sure thing is that trying to understand it from the angles presented by the media and US government will be a futile exercise. Like trying to look through a glass coated with crude oil….
  
  If this is a question about the media handling of the disaster then I don’t really want to go there (I’ll leave that to the spin doctors and sleaze merchants).
  
  have you thought of any novel solutions to the problem?
- Marianne Baker answered on 24 Jun 2010:
  
  Hey jpriestley
  
  All oil disasters are devastating. I can barely look at the pictures.
  However, I don’t know what can be done; there should have been more research into crisis management I expect.
  
  It seems most rigs are set up in the same or similar ways so I don’t really understand why there aren’t more safeguards and why they don’t know how to stop it. But it’s not my field at all, so I’d be interested to learn more.
  
  I hope it begins to improve soon; the impact on wildlife is horrendous.

Question: What are your views on the current BP oil crisis? Do you feel it coud have been handled better?

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