Apollo 13, the Gulf Oil Spill, and BP
Mr. Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, has again used the 1970 Apollo 13 experience as analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama’s administration’s and the supportive media have done the same, repeatedly. Nothing could be further from the truth!
The response after an oxygen tank explosion in the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its way to the Moon illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled. It stands in sharp contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Solve the problem first; then investigate objectively; apply the lessons; and then, if absolutely necessary, worry about responsibility.
Nothing in the government’s response to the blowout explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by NASA and its mission control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers worked on the assumption that “failure was not an option.” In contrast, President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of the Gulf oil spill situation “from day one” assumed that failure is an option and, indeed, may want BP to fail for their own ideological reasons. Whatever their motives, the president and his cabinet officers, without any experience in real-world management of anything major, much less a crisis, have no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.
It has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf state officials to respond as best they can in a regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful, and hesitant. Rather than allowing BP to stay focused only on solving the problems of the spill, Attorney General Holder now has launched a civil and criminal investigation! And let’s then follow with sending an unsupported bill to BP for $69 million! For good measure, lets also stop offshore oil exploration by the United States. How misguided (or ignorant and devious) can our president be!
There are severe implications of the way Obama & Co. are (mis)handling this crisis that extend far beyond the ecological. The oil spill illuminates the Obama syndrome: the physical and emotional and managerial absence of the president. There is nothing in Obama’s resume that shows he ever made highly difficult decisions that depended, at the end, on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. So he does not tackle the inbox because its contents are above his competence. (One is reminded of Obama telling Rick Warren that when an unborn child gets human rights is “above my pay grade.”) He tends instead to lesser matters that match his lower level of competence and protect his ego.
Richard Cohen nailed it last fall: “This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama.”
The world is becoming more dangerous because of this administration, not less. But don’t worry, just play another round of golf and everything will be all right.
I wrote a lot more about this problem on Sense of Events.
Thank you for this utterly sane take on events, Dr. Schmidt.
I would only add that we all know which groups have put BP and other oil companies in the much more technologically challenging deep water environment, when there is so much more readily accessible oil in shallow water (where the tech difficulty is relatively trivial) that has been placed off limits.
This administration , never letting a crisis go to waste, has used the oil spill to recklessly do further damage to our Nation and promote it’s far, far, left agenda. May God help us and deliver us from these awful people.
Can you back this statement up with anything of substance or do you just work on crazy.
Obama is already using the spill to promote his long-dead cap-and-trade bill. He has been derided by none other than Maureen Dowd in the NY Times for using the crisis to promote his political agenda. Other examples: Why does he not respond to Bobby Jindal’s request for federal permission to build barrier berms? The state of Louisiana has been waiting almost a month for a reply. But oh, that’s right: Jindal is a Republican. Could that also be why Obama’s Administration met with the AGs of all the affected states EXCEPT Florida? B/c Florida’s AG is a Republican and is running for governor. Sure looks like they have no intention of aiding Republican governors or potential Republican governors – I suppose in hopes that the Republicans will take the fall and a Dem will get in office instead. So in other words, they’ll do something about the oil spill, but only if it helps their agenda and the Democratic party. He’s either incompetent or he’s evil, b/c nothing less than an evil person would allow an entire ecosystem (never mind the people, the jobs, etc) to go belly-up for his personal gain. But in the meantime, while Louisiana waits for a response, Obama has taken two vacations, spent $50K to take Michelle on a date to NYC (why that required THREE airplanes, I’ll never figure out), and had a big party with Paul McCartney. Isn’t he supposed to be a leader? Helluva way to lead.
And oh, btw, it was Obama’s Administration that approved the substandard construction and safety procedures used by BP. Yeah. In fact, about a week before the spill they approved amendments that likely led to the spill – and managed to approve them in 5 minutes or less after receiving the requests. But Louisiana still waits for permission to build barrier berms.
He has used the spill as a justification to halt not just deep water drilling, but all deep water exploration as well.
The rig that went down was doing exploration. Try and keep up with the facts. It would seem to me that if this could happen again that stopping deep see drilling until they have better and safer technology would be a good idea. Unless we want to explain to the next generation how great it was to be able to swim in the ocean. You people are all about not putting a financial burden on the next generation, but are happy to put the environmental burden on the next generation. Environmental burdens cost money too.
The bill presented to BP was 69 million, not billion.
The tragedy of this disaster will by used by the anti-civilization wing of the environmental movement to further restrict and strangle energy production, thereby insuring vast additional economic pain for all of us. They won’t stop until they have us back to the stone age.
The administration’s response to this situation looks more and more as if they are hoping this will be the Three Mile Island of domestic oil, to strangle the eeevil oil industry. Roadblocks to the governor’s sand barrier proposals and forcing BP to divert attention to escaping prosecution have been very effective in ensuring as much damage as possible, and Obama’s already trying to use the situation as an argument for his ‘green’ legislation. They seem to have gone beyond ‘not letting a crisis go to waste’, into prolonging the crisis.
It appears BP was almost totally unprepared for this disaster. No “fail safe”. No backup plan. From what I have been reading, there has been a series of tragic mistakes and oversights, from the actual drilling procedure, through the actual explosion and fire, and attempt to put out the blaze. One of the more interesting points, explained by a talking head, (don’t know how much credibility this person had) was that the fire boats actually sank the rig by putting too much water on it. It seems if the rig was kept from sinking, the pipe would not have been broken.
I agree totally with your analogy of the Apollo capsule fire. On the positive side, the attempts to build caps and containment domes, and the use of robotic subs, has been amazing. The fact that these large structures have been designed, engineered and built in so little time, show that there are some serious hard work and dedication happening.
Politically, the Obama administration, too me, has been completely incompetent. I see absolutely no value added to anything they have done. The one area I could see the Federal Government handling, is to coordinate the containment of the spill and cleanup operations. Has the Federal Government actually made any real, positive contributions? The Federal Governments response has been far, far worse in this case, than its response during Katrina
But whether we got our men back from Apollo 13 or lost Grissom and his comrades, we did not have millions of gallons of oil leaking out and eventually screwing up the lives of millions of people. There is an ongoing aspect to this disaster that puts it in a different category.
My understanding is that the blow-out preventer was damaged, and they knew that it was damaged. Corners were cut, as I imagine they often are, BP was pushing to get Deepwater out of there as quickly as they could…as they probably always do… but this time…BLAM!!
At least we will get some immediate wealth transfer from deep-pocketed BP to folks sopping up the oil.
We have a sad example of how you can have 1000 wells operating safely, surviving hurricanes etc. but ONE screw-up creating a terrible, terrible situation. The reactions to this will probably fall along predictable political lines, but common sense tells me that you give more shallow water permits to avoid the deep water ones, but giving out ANY permits under water after this mess will raise some ripples for some time.
Excellent essay. Failing and learning from failure are essential to progress. But a culture accustomed to avoiding inconvenience, one where risk, hardship and sacrifice have become increasingly unacceptable, and where choices mustn’t involve messy trade-offs or consequences will resort to the sort of highchair-banging hysterics we’ve gotten from our so-called leadership classes in response to this challenge.
We are a less serious people than the Americans who met and conquered Apollo-era challenges.
We need more articles like this one. Crisis management is a learned technique and there are plenty of sources to learn how to do it. This bunch, though, hasn’t reached the point they even know what they don’t know. There used to be an old cartoon of the 7 stages of crisis management. The seventh stage was to shoot the wounded and promote the uninvolved. This bunch starts by sending out Holder with his gun to shoot exactly the people he needs to solve the crisis.
Last week, Rudy Giuliani talked about the administration’s response as a potential Harvard Business School case study in “How not to Manage a Crisis”. The administration is looking at this as a mere political problem to be mitigated. it is not looking at it as an engineering problem.
The President should be having a very short daily conference call with the BP team trying to contain the well to get a quick status update and see if there is anything the government can do to help. They should then have a longer internal meeting to address what the government is going to do to contain the oil already in the gulf. They should be working with the states. If Jindal says he needs a sand berm, Obama should ask where and when he needs to show up with his shovel. Instead we get standard government process: “We need an environmental impact statement”. No, we don’t. We know what the impact of oil in the wetlands is. Obama needs to bypass the “process” people and go for “results” people.
Look, there are 100′s of thousands of people in this country who could better manage this whole thing than the administration is doing. The guys are clearly in over their heads. They need to find someone to run it for them. Someone who will go after fixing the problem rather than worrying about the politics. Worrying about the politics has clearly failed. Leave Axlerod in a room by himself.
“Crisis management is a learned technique and there are plenty of sources to learn how to do it.”
The problem with that is that the only Crisis Management they know, is how to make it worse. It’s a totally different philosophy that, once ingrained, can only be expunged by a grave.
‘Doing something’, means something totally different to these mental midgets, and, the longer it lasts, the better they believe their chances of profiting from it improve.
In the heyday of NASA “Crisis Mangagement” was a part of the After Action Report, when everyone had a chance to sit down and figure out what they would not do next time.
Not exactly disagreeing with my fellow Grant County native Harrison Schmidtt, but I will point out one thing. . .
Obama did have a plan put together. He asked esteemed film director James Cameron for advice on what to do, (beyond the immediate “boot on your neck” threats of prison time and financial ruin for BP employees.
It’s a little bit like if Nixon had asked the writers of the Batman comic book series for advice when Apollo 13 had its difficulty.
Schmitt, The only thing impressive about this article is how much you can write without saying anything of substance. How about some facts to back up your contentions. All I am seeing is an Obama hate rant. What more could this administration be doing?
Really? Anyone with any engineering and crisis management experience knows what Schmitt was saying. Schmitt was also comparing and contrasting the Apollo engineering responses to a crisis with the response we are seeing from the administration.
I am surprised you missed all that and considered this essay to be merely an “Obama hate rant”. I assure you, Schmitt was being quite serious and objective.
What more could the administration be doing? Well, for starters, they could have burned the oil – WHICH WAS THE PLAN THEY APPROVED IN THE PERMIT THEY GRANTED BP, in the event of a spill. And please don’t blame it on Bush, b/c the permit was issued by Obama’s Administration. But then Obama, in spite of approving it beforehand, nixed burning when BP requested it b/c it would cause air pollution. Well, in a month, the prevailing westerlies would have dissipated that pollution. You’re not going to get rid of this mess in a month, not in the ocean. Never mind that there is no bringing back wetlands. Once they die, they are gone forever, and 40% of America’s wetlands are in that region. Obama might also have agreed to chemical dispersants, but he nixed that, too. In other words, he has partied and gone on vacation (twice) and pretty much done everything EXCEPT everything he could do. But then, that’s the lightweight response I would expect from someone who gave leadership of the MMS to a lawyer friend instead of to, say, a petroleum engineer or a geologist. The same someone who views govt. positions as tokens to hand out for political favors, not jobs that need expertise and actual knowledge. Are you even aware that Obama has known since April how bad the spill is, and he has done nothing until the past week or so – and mostly what he’s done is enjoy photo ops. On a beach that was pre-scrubbed before his arrival. God, what a know-nothing idiot we have for a president.
Try taking off your Obama 2012 glasses and try re-reading the article again.
The uncomfortable fact that no one seems willing to confront is that a business-as-usual, fossil fueled future is neither sustainable nor in the interests of the developed OR the developing world. When did we forget this? Until our computer models are perfect and we can say with near certainty that the various climate feedbacks cancel out in our favor (which is not looking very likely as it stands), it is exceedingly stupid to predicate the continued growth of our economies on an energy source that has a good chance of radically altering the earths climate and provoking famine, war, and mass human migration on a scale we can scarely imagine.
We can transition smoothly if we stop dithering and start now, as many reseachers have documented, or we can have the transition forced on us 30 or 40 years down the line at an enormous cost in human life, biodiversity, and political stability. Instead our long term strategy so far is one indistinguishable from that of yeast: multiply and consume and multiply and consume until we are poisoned by cur own waste products. We might be smart creatures individually, but in aggregate, we seem to be almost comically ineffectual and incompotent at managing our long term future.
Gosh, you really know how to tell a story don’t you? Did you ever think about selling some of your fiction? Art Bell and Whitley Streiber made a bunch of money writing a book about that very thing, well, actually it was the opposite, “The Coming Great Super Storm.”
However, they were a lot closer to the truth than the tale you tell, because, looking back over the entire history of this planet, it would appear to be one almost continuous Ice Age, with tiny warm periods now and then. Of course, we have the Medieval Warm Period, followed by a mini Ice Age, then the temperature seems to settle down for a few Centuries, until now, with the warming trend that historically presages another cold spell, maybe, even a real Ice Age.
I think you need to go back and tell your handlers that we didn’t buy it, work up another spiel and come back for another try.
We already know that the current warming is much less than several warming episodes over the last 10,000 years.
We already know that hte current warming can be completely explained by using the PDO, the AMO, and SOI.
We already know that CO2 never leads climate change, it always trails.
We already know that the so called climate models are worthless.
We already know that you are an idiot.
Which Presidents since Eisenhower did have big-time enterprise crisis management experience?
(And which ones before him did? Maybe Hoover.)
Most other presidents knew when to call in the experts for the experience that they lacked.
@ 13 Ron Coleman: UnPresidented ?
Geo. Washington for one, if you consider winning a war crisis management.
More generally:
Obama would take advantage of the crisis, if he thought he could get away
with it, or if he thought the backlash would be overtaken by a real crisis,
say in the Middle East, or in the US economy.
For those without experience at the interfaces between politics, management,
and engineering: Apollo 204 was a mistake, Apollo 13 was an accident, the
Shuttle losses were criminal mismanagement, and deep sea drilling, in general,
sems to have been a politically manufactured crisis.
I _really_ hope I am wrong about this, because this sort of act will not stand.
This article promotes sound scientific, technological, and managerial thinking as a response to this crisis, but overlooked is the fact that now even science has been thoroughly politicized, the primary example being global warming. To a progressive, every aspect of life is all politics, all the time. Instead of calls for rational thinking, it would be easier to suggest that all progressives be magically whisked off by UFO’s to Alpha Centauri, where they can do damage only to themselves and allow the rest of us to put back together a sane, prosperous country.
Who knew you were such a bleeding heart? If some street kid robs a liquor store you scream for the death penalty–but when a big oil company destroys an entire region of the country, you’re suddenly calling for calm, measured responses, just like an old-time liberal.
I wasn’t aware that when a kid robs a liquor store, it is by accident.
BTW, you sound less moronic if you refrain from ridiculous strawmen. Nobody has ever proposed the death sentence for armed robbery.
If this sh*t had happened in China, my bet is a few people would already have gotten the miracle little thing that keeps business rolling, that is its highness, the sacred bullet. This is un unprecedented ecological disaster on american shores and it seems the culprits get away by paying a ridiculous amount in fines and other sh*t. Does anyone believe they really did the best to avoid and repair the damage ? My gosh, can we really wait until the whole world be covered in oil from that cursed pipe ?
I am interested in the idea that the decision NOT to burn was important. My sense is that most of this stuff is still underwater. Is there any credible evidence (other than the desire to show Obama as incompetent) that burning early would have made much of a difference?
This event has more similarity with the challenger shuttle explosion than Apollo 13;
Corners were cut, decisions made due to financial / political expediency, and people died as a result of those decisions. Had someone stepped back at any point and had the guts to stop, review, think and deliberate openly, bring experts in, both of these tragic events need not have happened.
As far as bringing in James Cameron, he has quite a bit of Deep Water robotic experience, at far greater depths than this. He is also connected to various groups worldwide that could have offered deep sea engineering assistance. Asking him was not a bad idea, as he has decade+ experience using deep sea robotics.
Since we’re on the usual bashing Obama routine…what exactly did Ronnie “The Saint” Reagan do after the Exxon Valdez spill?
Here’s the answer: NADA.
Might that be because in March of 1989, Reagan was no longer President?
It’s true: you could look it up.
one of the best simple responses I’ve read in a while: Bar None!
By the Way……
Environmentalism did not cause the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, but it did help make it possible, just as 1989’s Exxon Valdez disaster, which the Gulf Oil spill has now eclipsed, was also ironically made possible by a desire to protect the environment.
The original plan when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope was to build a pipeline directly to the northern border of the 48 contiguous states. Groups like the Sierra Club waged a major battle against both the Prudhoe Bay development and the pipeline.
They lost on the drilling but won a small victory in forcing the pipeline to not traverse the continent via a safer land route but to dead end at the port of Valdez, Alaska. The rest, as they say, is history.
Had the oil companies gotten their way, there would have been no tanker to be run aground by its captain on March 24, 1989, causing 10.8 million gallons of crude oil to be dumped into Alaskan waters.
What more could the Admin do? How about mobilizing the Ships to clean and contain the spill and to accept the offered help from 17 countries!! What about creating a perimeter around the spill so the oil could not reach the wetlands or the beaches!! Obama had a chance to be a world hero and open a new era in international cooperation for “manmade disasters”, but did nothing!! Perhaps it was not in the Admins best interest to let the world see that even a large spill can be contained and cleaned rather well!! They twiddled their thumbs while the oil gushed for 50 days!! Obama postured like a concerned citizen instead of the most powerful person in the world. The untold psychological and economic damage to the Gulf Coast was almost totally preventable!! The Administrations’ purposfull inaction allows BP to become the focus of hatred, and obscure the Govt.s’ destructive role. This is worse than anything that happened with Bush’s handling of Katrina by several orders of magnitude. Obama: a. can’t manage a hot dog stand. or; b. did it on purpose. In my opinion, the decision to have BP as solely responsible for the clean up is absolutely criminal.
“Obama had a chance to be a world hero and open a new era in international cooperation for “manmade disasters”, but did nothing!! ”
==========
True enough. Obama did all he was capable of doing.
comparing Apollo 13 disaster to the Gulf disaster. Wow, that’s a goofy stretch of engineering prowess. And while we’re at it remember that the genious engineers at NASA saved those three guys oxygen supply with duct tape and cardboard. Don’t think that’s going to cut it this time, girls…
HALIBURTON and TRANSOCEAN were the MAIN causes of the BLOW OUT because of their INCOMPETENT STUPIDITY overcoming SEVEN LAYERS of Blow Out Protection. They were only drilling far far offshore because of AMERICAN Green NAZI moonbat legislation that STUPID AMERICAN voters demanded and left wing moonbats like OBAMA pushed.
So who does your stupid President bad mouth why the BRITISH Oil Company who hired the STUPID INCOMPETENT AMERICAN companies HALIBURTON and TRANSOCEAN to work for them.
HOW STUPID and how typically left wing moonbat of OBAMA and the stupid AMERICAN ‘lame stream ‘ Media and PUBLIC.
Harrison Schmitt is correct to hold up NASA in the 1960′s as the gold standard of crisis management. But his recommendation for BP and the Obama administration to follow the same crisis management procedures glosses over a few important points.
1. NASA’s culture of safety in the 1960′s was pervasive. No expense was spared to reduce the probability of every potential failure to as close to zero as possible. Redundant systems were used wherever practical to mitigate the effects of any failure that did occur. There were detailed, step-by-step crisis management plans that were PRACTICED by the Flight Control and other teams. When the Apollo 13 accident occurred, no one had any reason to second guess the NASA engineers. At the time, there was no discussion whatever about negligence.
By contrast, BP America has a well known reputation for choosing profits over safety and has a judicial record of criminal negligence. It is currently allowed to operate only because it promised to clean up its act. The investigation after the 2005 explosion at the Texas City refinery revealed a management decision NOT to protect workers from a possible explosion because it would be cheaper to pay off their families when they died. Recent news stories have revealed that BP corporate policy mandates run-to-failure rather than preventive maintenance of their equipment. Their safety inspection reports and disaster mitigation plan for the Gulf are jokes. There are reasonable questions about their capability to manage the growing disaster. Unfortunately, there is no U.S. Government agency that is in a better position to manage it.
2. The total economic impact of an Apollo mission failure would have been the lives of three astronauts, the loss of a few billion dollars worth of hardware, and the possible cancellation of some late Apollo and Skylab missions. I’m not trying to make light of this. Three beautiful families would have lost husbands/dads, and National pride would have taken a big hit. But the economic impact was fairly small.
By contrast, the Gulf oil spill has already impacted the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Gulf coast residents and may ultimately affect millions of people. The food supply has already been affected, and the food chain that provides us with shrimp, oysters and red snapper may not recover in my lifetime. Fishermen and charter boat operators are out of luck. Owners of tourist attractions on the gulf shore may soon start defaulting on their mortgages. Etc.
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