WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU -- FRONTLINE: OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL

WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU – FRONTLINE OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2010

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FRONTLINE is a television public affairs program. You watch it. You see BP executives’ parade by along with other oil company executives. You get a glimpse into Congressional hearings as minor theatre.

The hearings remind you of when your father took you out to the woodshed to give you a beating. He feigned the performance with you cooperating by yelling in pain for those up at the house thinking you got your just do. Congressional hearings are a similar charade of complicity.

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The program was not limited to the April 20, 2010 oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, or the subsequent horrors of millions of gallons of crude contaminating the Gulf and its ecosystem putting thousands out of work, but covered a broader spectrum of BP insolence and ineptitude.

FRONTLINE also covered the fire and explosion at the Texas City Refinery on March 23, 2005 where 15 workers were killed and 17 injured. Lawsuits of that disaster continue to this day.

The program in addition covered the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak of some 267,000 US gallons into 1.9 areas of land in Alaska on March 2, 2006. The fortunate aspect of this spill was that it was in the winter. It did not get into the ecosystem, and was successfully recovered.

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ALL TOO HUMAN

The viewer of this program sees Chairman of the Board of British Petroleum, Lord John Brown, taking on the multiple personality of Caligula. At first, we see him as noble, moderate and engaged as he pontificates his vision of the BP Empire.

He is viewed in seminar with his minions, whom he sees as “turtles,” like obedient Ninja Turtles. Then we see him becoming increasingly detached and irritated after a series of BP disasters, only to retreat into the sanctuary of his arrogance until the BP Board clips his wings plunging him into the perversity of schadenfreude. Yes, the program hints at a scandal.

He steps down and his curly headed best boy Ninja Turtle, Tony Hayward, steps into the breach. We see Sir Tony again in seminar addressing his Ninja Turtles on how safety and security are going to be the watchwords of his watch. No sooner said then there is the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

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These upper class public school boys know how to talk but not necessarily how to walk the talk. Hayward, a disarmingly charming little fellow, seems always to want to be somewhere else definitely out of the frame. He confirms this when he complains to reporters about the incessant demands on him, “I want to get my life back.” That remark blew up in his face.

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In viewing the Brown and Hayward appearances before Congressional hearings, you get the distinct impression they feel bored and exasperated by having to tolerate such inane questions from such a mediocre panel.

Hayward, I suspect largely because of his insouciance, is relieved of control and sent back to England to join his mates at his yacht club and sailing regatta.

In steps the tall blond American, who once ran AMOCO, Robert Dudley. He assumes a low profile until the well is capped. Then, surprisingly, he starts making like this is not all BP’s fault, adding self-indulgence to the BP executive profile.

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As these men paraded across the television screen, I thought of Nietzsche’s “all too human,” men charged with major responsibilities unable to escape their collective pettiness, failing not only to act as managers but even less as leaders. They pranced, prowled, postured and pouted, as I would imagine Nero and Napoleon once did. They are the prototype of what constitutes leadership today. And they are legion in every aspect of American society. They are also the one percent earning up to fifty percent of our collective wealth. We wonder why we are having problems.

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WHEN A WHISPER BECOMES A SHOUT

Such men as Brown, Haywood and Dudley can be imagined sitting together with their minions coming up with the strategy, “We have to cut costs by twenty-five percent across the board.”

This is whispered in conference but shouted into the heavens at operational levels across the globe.

Top management whispers its short-range thinking and the die is cast across the corporate world to its remotest parts. No one thinks of unintended consequences. Expediency rules. That means what is most career enhancing and will cause the least fuss is followed. Union workers won’t be touched but vulnerable professionals without clout will be dispatched.

The greatest savings, however, will be found in operations by cutting back on maintenance, engineering, research, training and development, safety and security. BP has been doing precisely this for years.

(1) At Prudhoe Bay, they cut back on running a pig through the pipelines to remove corrosion and interference, and in some cases quit the process altogether. In addition, they quit hiring highly qualified inspectors in the field and put unqualified people into the jobs to show they had an inspection corps. Moreover, repairs and maintenance were cut back.

(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery was in start-up mode and its isomerization unit malfunctioned. A tower began to fill with gasoline, overflowed, and the excess gasoline flowed into a back up unit, which overflowed sending a geyser of gasoline into the air with a tremendous explosion. Operations were in risk denial with risk blinders on, as the instrumentation meant to monitor and prevent this from happening had not been repaired.

(3) A hurricane hit an oilrig but did not cause damage to this forty-story tower. The collapse of two stanchions was due to a valve meant to discharge water in such an emergency. It had been installed backwards taking on water instead leading to the collapse.

(4) The oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico failed to use the proper mud and cylinder protection for the well. Maintenance procedures had been cut back or abandoned as part of the twenty-five percent cost reduction program. When Tony Hayward was asked about mud and cylinder protection, he claimed total ignorance as if that was not part of his job. “That’s operations.”

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It is easy to point fingers at BP executives as if this cost cutting business was an isolated case, which it isn’t. The pressure to be profitable results too often in putting profits before people, and shareholders before good sense.

(1) The Prudhoe Bay disaster could have been avoided with a $100,000 investment, instead it cost millions;

(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery disaster could have been avoided with an investment of $1 million, instead it cost tens of millions;

(3) The faulty installation of the discharge valve for the oilrig in the hurricane could have been nothing; instead it cost millions to get the rig operating again;

(4) The oilrig disaster in the Gulf could have been avoided by following maintenance procedures for about $1 million; instead it is costing tens of billions of dollars and irrevocable damage to the ecosystem and the economic stability of the region.

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LIVINGSTON HAS IT RIGHT

William L. Livingston IV, author of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), addresses the problems of organizational bondage with insight, penetrating logic, and courageous indifference to sacred cows.

He recognizes the flaws of institutional society, its infallibility and inability to learn from its mistakes much less its excesses. He sees management in its present iteration as an obstacle to progress. And he sees education from our most esteemed institutions to the common denominator of primary and secondary education in rigid conformity to hindsight thinking.

Livingston is an engineer, and the society that we all enjoy is the product of engineering. It has taken the science of research and developed that science into products and services that have created modernity.

One wonders if his book might find a different audience than the one he seeks. That was true of Jonathan Swift and his “Gulliver Travels” (1726). It was meant as a political satire aimed at the English people, and became a children’s classic. I sense that Livingston’s work meant for engineers surviving in a litigious climate might become a social commentary of our times.

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THE WORLD IS LEAVING THE UNITED STATES BEHIND

From 1950 to 1980, it was said, as the United States goes, so goes the world. That was my era. It was also the time when a world decimated by World War Two in which tens of millions lost their lives. It was a world hungry for American products and services.

It was easy for a poor boy to get an education, to rise in the corporation, and to experience a privileged existence that was new in his family’s history. Detroit ruled and the big three automakers created the working middleclass by generous pay and benefits. Companies across the nation emulated Detroit.

Organizations grew fat and lazy with as many as twelve levels of management when there had only been three during the war. Public schools, public transportation, public parks and libraries, public recreation centers, public highways, bridges, dams and millions of miles of railroad tracks made mobility a common experience.

Working class philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is maintenance.” He was referring to how well kept our infrastructure, and how dedicated we were to excellence.

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The last thirty years, 1980 to 2010, have seen much of the American dream, upward mobility, and being better off then our parents fade. Stability has given way to flux, confidence to fear, moderation to greed. Manners have given way to vulgarity, trust to deception, ambition to short cuts, and education from enlightenment to job training.

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Alas, President Barak Obama has had the misfortune to come into office when the United States economy is shrinking for the first time in sixty years. Globalization and the technological revolution are the culprits in this tectonic shift, but many prefer to focus on Obama’s place of birth, religion and loyalty rather than the reality that drives our times.

We like to think of the United States as the lone Super Power, as No. 1, challenging anyone who would suggest otherwise. Rome was once in our shoes, so was Great Britain, and now it appears to be our turn to decline.

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Thomas Friedman discusses in his column today (October 28, 2010) a report headed by Charles M. Vest, formerly MIT president, titled “Gathering Storm.” The report concludes, “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated in the past five years.” Here are some US rankings:

(1) Sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness;
(2) Fortieth in rate of change over the last decade;
(3) Eleventh among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25-to-34-year-olds who have graduated from high school;
(4) Sixteenth in college completion rate;
(5) Twenty-second in broadband Internet access;
(6) Twenty-fourth in life expectancy at birth;
(7) Twenty-seventh among developed nations in proportion of college students receiving degrees in science and engineering;
(8) Forty-eighth in quality K-12 math and science education;

Friedman writes:

“A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by the best scientists and engineers.”

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We like comfort food, comfort lifestyles, comfort information, and comfortable demands placed on us. Comfort was an unknown luxury to anyone born in the 1930s of modest circumstance.

My generation when young could look back and remember bread and unemployment lines. We accepted the fact that we had no safety net; nobody to bail us out if we got into trouble because nobody we knew had any money or influence. We gutted it out. Some of us got lucky, and got an education and rode the 1950s to the 1980s with relative ease.

Looking back, we now feel blessed. There is a strange sense of freedom when you know it is all up to you. There were, of course, distractions but nothing compared to what there are now. There were temptations, again, but nothing compared to today. It is perhaps impossible for young people to understand how puritanical were social constraints.

The main difference was the world was thought to be America’s oyster and we behaved according to that inflated confidence. The last thirty years (1980 to 2010) have given Americans the feeling that the world is running on another track.

Double-digit unemployment (9.6 unemployment is a myth) could be with us for another generation or more. We still glory in our press clippings, in our celebrity while our healthcare costs are more than most other advanced societies but inferior in delivery. Our education is more expensive than other advanced societies and as “Gathering Storm” shows leaving something to be desired.

The irony is that other Third World countries such as China and India are now competing with us not only economically but also in terms of obesity and associated diseases with obesity. We have exported our appetites but not our modesty and discipline. So, I think Friedman is wrong to blame government alone. This is much bigger than government. It is the idea that once was America.

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