Sustainability: The Gift That Keeps on Giving (or Taking...)
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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
One of the ironies of the BP/Macondo well failure (also commonlly known as 'The Deepwater Horizon Spill" or "The Gulf Spill" or the "BP Spill") is that when it comes to sustainability, the spill itself gained a lot of attention but after just a few years, it seems to have fallen off the news radar. Perhaps it's because of other major, important incidents, such as the Duck Dynasty controversy or Miley Cyrus' twerking capabilities.
But regardless of the attention the spill (and its effects) gains or doesn't gain, the effects do continue to impact the Gulf, its peoplle, and its ecosystem. The irony, we suppose, is the sustainability (lastingness, in this case) of the oil and - on the good side - the continuing teachable moment we have in terms of integrating sustainability thinking in projects.
Just today, in fact, the US National Public Radio network posted this story about the continuing effects of the disaster. In part, it says:
This year, crews have collected 4.6 million pounds of oily material from the Gulf Coast shoreline. Coastal residents are asking how long they'll be living with the effects of BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
"A lot of people don't realize that the Deepwater Horizon response is still going on," says Coast Guard Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Anderson with the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team. "It's been a marathon, not a sprint."
And here is another interesting piece:
Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network documents the ongoing impacts of the BP oil spill. On Elmer's Island, he's armed with a specimen jar and blue latex gloves — and picking through tar balls in the tide line.
"You can look in this line, you can see (tarballs are) everywhere. So there's literally thousands and thousands and thousands of them," he says. He filled his jar in about three minutes with tar balls ranging from the size of a dime to a silver dollar.
"You crack them open and you can see they're kind of brownish and sandy on the outside, but open, they're black in the middle. You can smell it right away once you crack it open, the fumes start coming out of them," Henderson says.
Henderson also does regular flyovers of the Gulf's oil production platforms, looking for evidence of leaks that might not make the headlines that BP did.
"Any time could turn into something bigger. Clearly one of the dangers of deepwater drilling like this is once you have a blowout the damage is really going to be done and it's going to stick with you for a long time," he says.
It's easy, we know, to be a "Monday morning quarterback"* and second-guess what BP did - and didnt't do - in their planning for the Macondo project. But way back when the reports first started coming out, EarthPM focused on a scarcely-paid-attention-to Appendix from the Federal US Government report. Our blogs from back in late 2011 prove this. And now we'd like to re-focus your attention on this because as the oil continues to be discovered, and the 'sustainability' of the spill (in terms of its ongoing effects) still sometimes make the news, it's worth continuing to learn from this.
Appendix J of the report from the then BOEMRE department of the US Government is the actual Macondo well risk register. It has real people's names and real dates and real entries, just like the risk registers you use on your project. And it has risk categories and a risk rating guide from the Risk Management Plan just like you have on your projects (you DO have them, right?). The thing is, although BP's corporate ID guidelines allowed for Safety and Environmental risks to be captured (and coded in a light green color), you can see by scanning through the risk register that the only ones identiified (and thus the only ones with a chance of being treated) are blue and purple - Cost, Schedule, Production, Reserves, and NPV. Zero - yes, that's right - zero risks related to Safety and/or Environment were identified. Zero!
We pointed out then, and we think it's important to point out again now, that THIS is one of the key ways you can take just a little time now to integrate sustainability into your projects. It's a gift that keeps on giving. It's a thought, a wisp of a plan, that can save you gigantic, perhaps even life-saving problems later on. Simply including these risks (identifying them!) would have helped immeasurably. Decisions would have been taken differently. We cannot - nobody can ever - know for sure whether it would have made the difference and saved 11 lives at Macondo. But we can take the lesson to heart - and give the gift that keeps on giving: Sustainability Thinking.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from EarthPM!
*See a definition of this admittedly US-centric term here.
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: December 21, 2013 03:22 PM |
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