Accidents Happen No Matter How Careful You Are

The huge oil disaster caused by the explosion and fire on the oil rig off the gulf coast at the end of April which continues to cause huge amounts of oil to be leaked into the sea each day should be a warning not just about the risks of offshore oil rigs but also any other potential risk.

We are always being told how safe things are and that there is no need to be concerned. The oil industry would claim an excellent record but that is of no use when things do suddenly go terribly wrong.

Just suppose this was a nuclear power plant that suffered catastrophic failure and it was as difficult to shut down and secure as this oil well is proving to be. What chance would the local population have and how wide an area of the country might be permanently unusable?

It is all very well saying there is only a one in one hundred thousand chance or whatever the figure is, but when you have 1,000 nuclear facilities around the world that suggests we can expect to get one failure every ten years.

We actually have 437 operating nuclear power stations at present, according to the European Nuclear Society, with another 55 under construction. The old plants are reaching the ends of their lives in many cases and new construction is likely to be safer and better designed than the earlier ground breaking installations but if there is one thing to be learned from the OIL rig disaster in the USA. If it can go wrong, it might.

It doesn’t matter how many safety features you have installed. You can train people until they are blue in the face. Whatever you do, nothing is certain and mistakes, errors and unexpected events can occur that throw all your plans and security measures out of the window.

We are facing an enormous environmental disaster from a simple underwater pipe that carries oil out of the ground heaven forbid we ever have to deal with a nuclear power station out of control that we are unable to shut down or contain.

Accidents happen, that’s why they are called accidents, and I don’t care how well you plan something is sure to go wrong sometime though human error or malfunction.

Remember the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because some of the calculations had been done in Imperial measurements and others done in Metric? They were very clever people who managed to make such a careless mistake. People make mistakes, it’s what makes us human.