The Deepwater horizon case discussion questions

Question

in a normal length post, you are free to scrutinize and discuss any aspect of the case, including the technical, legal, environmental, or ethical details. However, I would like you to include some explicit discussion of the decision of the engineers overseeing operations on the Deepwater Horizon, especially those identified in the emails compiled by the Ingersoll article below. To what were these decisions an engineering failure? What aspects of the engineer’s code of ethics did they violate? What might they have done different to prevent such a disaster?

Required readings:

• Ingersoll BP and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster of 2010
• BBC Horizons (video, 1 hr): BP Oil Spill: The Untold Story
• BBC In Focus (video, 1hr): Profit Pollution and Deception: BP and the Oil Spill
• Klein: A hole in the world
• Houke: Worst Case and the Deepwater Horizon Blowout: There Ought to Be a Law
• Smith et al: Analysis of Environmental and Economic Damages from British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon Oil

Additional sources:

• Wikipedia: Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
• Image: 6 steps that doomed the rig
• Image: What happened on the Deepwater Horizon
• Image: xkcd: Lakes and Oceans (warning: large!)
• Konopka “Public, Ecological, and Normative Goods: The Case of Deepwater Horizon”