The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster was responsible for the deaths of 11 workers and the explosive release of an estimated 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. A cascade of safety failures caused it — failures that the Obama administration corrected with enhanced inspection requirements to help ensure such a disaster never happens again.
The Trump administration on Friday decided that safety and environmental protection are overrated. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement prepared new regulations rolling back the previous administration’s rules, deeming them overly burdensome. It is a shockingly short-sighted decision, but not even slightly surprising given this administration’s reckless trajectory.
The Deepwater Horizon explosion ranked alongside the 2007-2008 banking collapse and economic meltdown as two of the greatest man-made catastrophes of the past decade. Both could have been prevented with stricter regulations. Government was well-justified to correct its regulatory deficiencies.
Congress established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to serve as an independent watchdog over dangerous, abusive banking practices. But Trump has spent months working to undermine the CFPB and in late November replaced the bureau’s director with White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. It’s just a matter of time before protections designed to prevent another meltdown disappear.
The 2010 oil spill disaster was a nightmare on a different scale. For 87 days, America watched helplessly as crude oil billowed from a gaping wellhead 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf, thwarting the best efforts of top experts to contain it.
The disaster occurred because a safety device called a blowout preventer failed at the one moment when it was needed to shut the well down. A backup device, called a blind shear ram, was activated, but it also failed. The result was the largest oil spill in U.S. history and an environmental disaster that ravaged the coastline and shore economies from Texas to Alabama.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board determined why both the blowout preventer and blind shear ram failed. It warned that other offshore rigs rely on the same technology and could face similar failures if regulatory steps weren’t taken. Simple miswiring of electronic equipment on the wellhead led to catastrophe. Rigorous inspections might have detected the problem, but they weren’t required at the time. The Obama administration imposed a requirement for independent safety inspections that only took effect in 2016.
The Trump administration, buying into oil industry whining, plans to relax the requirements even though they haven’t been in place long enough for anyone to gauge whether they seriously affect offshore exploration and production. The administration’s new rules, largely written by the very industry they’re designed to regulate, will replace requirements with “recommended practices.”
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to … oh, never mind.