To enhance offshore oversight, some experts say data from the sensors could be transmitted to a command center onshore or to government agencies. This would let regulators monitor rig operations and provide information about what happened during a spill or blowout. "What I'm talking about is an extra set of eyes" off the platform, says Elgie Holstein, a strategic planner at the Environmental Defense Fund.
3 manage the cleanup like Churchill
In the 1990s, experts from Columbia University and Boeing Corporation tried to prod the oil industry into planning for disasters as a critical part of the so-called lean management movement. No luck.
"The industry thought it was added cost, and because incentives were heavily biased towards cost cutting, they turned it down," says Roger Anderson, a senior scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
One result: BP has in essence been trying to invent ways to stop the blowout in the Gulf on the fly. This may be the most basic lesson from the disaster about how to manage oil spills in the future. As simple as it sounds, oil companies need to acknowledge that catastrophic events are going to happen, even if infrequently, and build responses into their corporate DNA, no matter what the cost.
In BP's case, "it's not so much that they weren't prepared, it's that they had not even considered the possibility" of such an event, says Dr. Anderson.
Concerns about the lack of response planning carry eerie echoes of hurricane Katrina. Yet there are differences with oil spills. One is the overlapping web of responsibilities. Oil companies control the rigs where the accidents happen. Once the crude gushes up from the seafloor, other entities get involved. But government and other responders still have to rely on the companies to stop the blowout.
