Nobody likes the sound of an alarm.  Trouble is, by ignoring them you can suffer late arrival to work, a stolen car, a burned down house, or 29 coal miners and 11 oil workers killed.  Sadly, the latter is a lesson in corporate negligence that we’re only gradually learning.  If only we’d keep reading…

The New York Times reported Friday that Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded on April 20, told federal investigators that the main safety alarm aboard the rig was “inhibited” to avoid waking sleeping rig workers. 

This newly revealed level of negligence by Transocean, owner of Deepwater, is grounds for serious reprimand from the government and civil litigation.

In the weeks leading up to the explosion, numerous systems failures were cited.  In at least once instance, a critical gas ventilation mechanism was set to “bypass mode.”  Williams complained, but was shot down by superiors.  Williams quotes Mark Hay, the rig’s subsea supervisor, as saying,

“The damn thing’s been in ‘bypass’ for five years…The entire fleet runs them in ‘bypass.’”

Now, I’m all for a ‘snooze’ setting, but I might think twice if my alarm clock’s factory settings included a methane gas explosion that would vaporize my bedroom.

The Gulf oil spill is not the only example of such irresponsible management of energy extraction. 

It is suspected that the exact same type of systems override caused the April 5 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29.  As NYT reported,

A company electrician has admitted that he was ordered to bypass a methane detector alarm when it kept interrupting the flow of coal.

Americans paid attention to UBB for a few weeks, until the Gulf disaster came roaring down and we all toddled off to it like kids in a game of tee ball.  What we need here is discipline for information.  We need to continue supporting federal investigations and good investigative journalism alike, and we need to keep reading the results.

This type of criminal negligence by energy tycoons is utterly intolerable, and we can start to combat it by keeping ourselves abreast of what’s going on.