Friday, July 23, 2010

Jed Lewison is a current Daily Kos editor and the creator and editor of Daily Kos TV. So as I was looking through the Daily Kos blogs of the day, I found one particularly interesting. Lewison posted July 23rd and writes about some newfound issues pertaining to the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The chief electronics technician, Mike Williams, said "the general safety alarm was habitually set to inhibited to avoid waking up the crew with late-night sirens. As a result of the alarms not being on, they did not go on in the time of the emergency. Lewison just replies to these claims with "seriously?" He goes on to say, "What is the point of having safety measures if you aren't going to use them?" To me, these are the same thoughts that ran through my head when I read the opening statement on the blog about the alarms being turned off. Oil rigs are very unsafe environments and for them to have been ignoring areas of safety, the repercussions were disastrous. Obviously, the alarm didn't cause the oil spill but if a simple alarm that is there for a purpose wasn't used, who's to say that any other set regulations weren't followed. Lewison goes on to say that the “executives of other oil companies use stories like this to characterize the disaster as an example of individual corporate failure.” It seems that when a disaster like this hits our nation, the first thing the public does is find someone to blame. In this particular issue, so many articles are posted everyday with new information that could have contributed to the overall disaster. However, Lewison believes that although BP and Transocean failed “egregiously,” they are still two of the biggest companies in the industry and when this blows over, they will “once again be welcomed back in to the oil industry fold.”

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