Oil use statistics

There are some fascinating snippets around regarding the increasingly appalling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. After the Exxon Valdez disaster Greenpeace ran an advert that said:

It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours. ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February 1990

As always with major environmental incidents there appear to be a large number of contributing factors. The culture of the three companies involved in the drilling, the lack of adequate regulation and oversight, the drive to cut costs to maximise profit; all the usual culprits.

And now the blame allocation is well under way. I have occasionally said that any Quality Management System has a secret procedure, QP00 'Allocation of Blame'. In this disaster it is quite obvious that management systems have not been properly implemented. The blame allocation flow chart is flailing around, coating everyone in a slime of toxic sludge. I know that politically everyone wants to be teflon coated however I feel that right now the extreme effort could be more appropriately directed to stopping the flow and dealing with the pollution. What was learned from the Valdez? That sooner or later, if corners are cut there will be a disaster. Here we have just such another instance. Cutting edge technology occasionally falls over. The closer to the edge we are the more likely the fall over the ragged edge of disaster. The closer to the edge the more important that we have an effective plan in place for when it all goes wrong. Because it will.

So, whilst we are looking for someone to blame, BP's statistics have been published in the Guardian with a fascinating graphic showing which countries have the highest oil consumption and where the proven reserves are. Have a look. There is also an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Times which brings you and me into the blame target and comments that if we want to avoid this sort of thing we (the general public) need to learn to live with higher prices because safety costs money.

I admit I have a mild tendency to smugness in my assessment of my own environmental impact but in reality I, in common with most middle-class greenies in the UK, account for the use of a great deal of oil. But then it is so much easier to see the mote in someone else's eye!

Emergency response planning

ISO14001, as part of the 'do' part of the standard, requires an organization to identify all the environmental emergencies that its operations could cause and put into place plans to respond to each of these. Depending on what you do or what you store on site there may be incidents that could happen which would be regarded as an emergency. For example, if your organization stores large quantities of oil or diesel on site, a big spill could cause a lot of local pollution. The standard asks that your organisation identify all the possible environmental emergencies that could happen on site and plan how to deal with them if they ever happen.

This is obviously an excellent idea. The standard requires that you spend time preparing and thinking about what you would do whilst you are calm, rather than making decisions whilst everyone is panicking. Your plan should tell you exactly what to do in all the possible emergencies, include the equipment you need (which you should get immediately) and should include appropriate contact details so you don’t have to waste time looking up this information.

In some emergencies, letting you neighbours know what is happening means that you don’t harm anyone off-site. You should occasionally practice your environmental emergency response to make sure that everyone knows what to do. An example would be doing a practice spill using water to see whether you could deal with this if it was diesel that had spilled. After a test you might change your plan to make it work better.

Should you actually have an emergency you should put your plan into operation. If you have done a good job the plan should enable you to quickly contain and deal with your potential pollution and once it has been properly dealt with the standard also requires that you find the root cause and make sure that this type of incident could never happen again. If your plan does not work as you had hoped you need to learn from its failure and improve it. Obviously.

So that is the theory. You may have noticed we have had a number of emergencies recently. One where the emergency response plan worked well and the other where it obviously hasn't. The first is the emergency that arose with the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. Once the threat became obvious all flights that might be affected by the ash cloud were cancelled. This stranded people across Europe, which is never ideal, but avoided any aeroplane falling out of the sky. There have been complaints of over caution but I would always rather that the precautionary principle was used. I never want to be in a plane that is taking a chance with my safety.

I have already mentioned the other emergency in this blog. That is the emergency arising on the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico which is currently spilling unimaginably vast quantities of oil into the sea, devastating the area around the rig and potentially causing ecological and financial damage over much of the gulf coast and beyond as the gulf stream spreads the slick. This is an example of an ineffective response plan. There seem to have been many things that went wrong but this is almost always the case with emergencies. Generally when only one thing goes wrong the effect can be contained. There have been reports of safety precautions being value engineered out and, although having the secondary precautions might not have changed anything, having designed them out to save money has been a strategic failure of the company.

More concerning though, is the report here that despite having filed a response plan, the actual response has been a failure, and what containment has been accomplished has been put in place by the US Navy rather than BP. The other issue raised is that this is the second time that BP has been responsible for an emergency response plan that has failed in a similar way. It's been 20 years since the Exxon Valdez but those are not lessons that should have been forgotten.

No organisation wants to find itself in the deep trouble that BP is currently experiencing. An emergency response plan that is regularly tested and maintained should help towards ensuring that if the worst should happen you are not seen as having been negligent, responsible for huge clean-up costs and with your reputation for environmental responsibility in tatters. When it all goes wrong, cost savings based on the assumption that everything will go to plan are seen to be misguided.In BP's case it won't just be the company paying the cost of their error but the wildlife and economies in the way of their mess.