In the event of a catastrophic accident, do one of the following:
Option 1: nothing; look away, hope it doesn’t happen again.
Option 2: panic and stop the process altogether.
Option 3: assess the damage and turn it into a learning experience, resulting in superior technological innovations, lives saved and improved safety procedures. And have a backup system available.
Throughout history, highly visible incidents were always more effective in either improving or ending “the age of [fill in your own obsolete technology]”, depending on that industry’s reaction to the incident and whether or not a proven backup system was in place.
Seventy-eight passengers perished in the 1933 crash of The USS Akron airship, but there were no photographers present to record the horrible accident, losing the disaster in historical anonymity. After the Akron disaster, airship travel lumbered along another four years until the Hindenburg had the misfortune of crashing with far fewer casualties but in full view of hundreds of people and several cameras. Airship travel was forced into option 2, since airplanes were proven at that point to offer improved and reliable air transportation, making a seamless aeronautic transition.
It’s not always how many die, or how much real estate is ruined – it’s how many witness the death and destruction that ultimately seals the fate of the process in question.
The sinking of the Titanic with no cameras present did nothing to stop the cruise ship industry, as anyone who ever reclined on a Carnival Lido deck and repeatedly tried to signal a server to bring him another over-priced whiskey sour and a plate of nachos would attest. There was at the time simply no other way in 1912 to cross the ocean, so with no reliable alternative trans-oceanic transport, the cruise ship industry wisely took its lumps, made improvements in construction and procedures and went with option 3.
Today, with daily air traffic traversing the oceans in hours instead of weeks, the cruise ship industry has evolved into a gaudy shell of its post-Victorian self, dispensing with the much-needed intra-continental transportation and instead providing 4-day alcohol-binged junkets to sun-drenched Caribbean colonies for budget-minded travelers willing to gamble against crippling food- and water-borne bacterias.
In the days following Hurricane Katrina crushing news coverage of the levee breaks in New Orleans overruled equally catastrophic damage on the Mississippi and Alabama gulf coasts. New Orleans was simply a better story, with the low-income, mostly African-American citizens stranded on the roofs and the swimming pets and what not providing media-generated cannon fodder against the Bush Administration, who they saw as the cause of the storm. Constant drum-beats of rage at the government’s slow response to New Orleans left other gulf coast communities fending for themselves, with not just slow but barely any response at all.
While there had been larger oil spills than the Exxon Valdez spill, The aftermath of that media circus in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989 did not stop supertanker transport of bulk petroleum products; in fact, it led to the construction of even larger tankers, so colossally huge they creep through the Panama Canal with mere inches to spare. Any ideas of how else we’re going to get 5 million barrels of crude a day into our country there, Sparky? Big Oil takes curtain 3, thanks.
More recently, critics of off-shore oil exploration are exploiting the minute-by-minute visibility of the deep-water horizon accident: underwater video of boiling oil from the gulf floor, and widely-circulated images of oil-coated ducks up to their necks in sweet crude quagmires tug at the heart-strings, and fuel the big oil detractors’ cries as proof that nothing good comes from this evil off-shore process. Warning klaxons of this being the largest spill in history are sounding. Barely three days after the explosion Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that he “Haff zeen zee oil-coated buds” and declared drillable deposits in Santa Barbara off-limits. Then he got in his 9 mpg Hummer and drove home.
It makes no economic sense to “stop” production of a reliable energy source while we “explore” its replacement. Zeppelin and cruise ship transportation did not just stop on news that a couple of bicycle repairmen were “exploring” air travel down in Kitty Hawk. You don’t pull Donna McKechnie from “A Chorus Line” and substitute her with a high school drama student understudy with no audition and hope she works out. Like those Gulf ducks, we Americans are up to our necks in fossil fuels, and abandoning domestic crude production continues our energy slavery to xenophobic and corrupted middle-eastern and South American regimes. Would we prefer our indispensable fuel products drilled by American workers by American and allied companies, or fuel that comes from a society that buries 14-year-old girls up to their necks and stones them to death because they made eye contact with someone other than the doddering geezer their fathers arranged for them to marry?
Until April 20, the off-shore gulf oil industry had a remarkable 30-year safety record – over 717 gulf derricks pumped 1.5 million barrels of gas and oil per day with no major incidents. Abandoning domestic oil production with no reliable large-scale backups is a short-sighted reaction with no basis in common sense. Accidents are as much part of industrial innovation as invention, and it is not what happens, but our reaction to it that dictates the next course of action – Option 3. We pray this awful situation will lead to improved cleanup technologies and stricter preparatory procedures, including forcing the federal government and the oil companies to follow their own rules. The alternative is to choose option 2 and just keep relying on thug-regime oil, at least until those stonings are more widely available on YouTube.
