When Kip Chalmers demanded to get through the Taggart Tunnel, he ordered TT to use a coal burning locomotive that could not run through the tunnel, rather than wait for a new diesel. He ordered TT to operate in an unsafe manner, in violation of their safety protocols because he refused to accept reality and wait for the engineers to work.

Did BP accept that drilling a well 5000ft. down is also an engineering feat? And that no amount of threats from the CEO could complete the well safely any faster than they were? No, the BP company men on the rig ordered the drillers to operate in an unsafe manner to save what we now know was an insignificant amount of time and money, with no motive other than pure greed and hubris.

BP decided that the liner/tieback well casing was too time-consuming and expensive to install, so they cut corners and used a cheaper, weaker method to save 3 days and $10million dollars.

BP disregarded Halliburton’s advice to use 21 centralizers to ensure an even concrete seal and instead used only 6. Installing the other 15 would take 10 hours and BP just couldn’t wait that long. Sound familiar yet?

The Blowout Preventer was damaged in March 2010 and BP did not repair the damage.

BP skipped the testing of the concrete bond because it would cost $128,000.

And just hours before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, a BP company man ordered Transocean employees, against their objections, to remove the heavy drilling mud from the well before it was fully sealed to save a bit of time. Surviving rig workers report that they were threatened with being fired if they didn’t obey BP’s orders. Hmm, now who else said that?

BP is the company who said that engineering progress can be conjured up by executive order, that costs can be cut without consequence, that safety measures can be disregarded to save a few bucks. BP’s push to complete the well in a criminally negligent manner caused the Deepwater Horizon explosion which killed 11 men, just like Kip Chalmers caused the Taggart Tunnel collapse.

I hope Thomas “Kip’s Ma” Friedman doesn’t send all our drilling rigs off somewhere to harvest soybeans. I can imagine Friedman intoning, “At a time of desperate public need, it’s our duty to sacrifice our luxurious [lifestyle and conserve] our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome [energy] on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There’s a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient.”

[Brackets mine...with apologies to Ms. Rand.]

Friedman loves the Orient. Chinese leaders can *get things done* without all that messy consent of the governed…

Best regards!

In liberty,
–Colin Fraizer
Plainfield, IN, USA

What’s obvious to me, however, is that like some wonderfully Promethean character out of Ayn Rand’s elitist and libertarian and somewhat anti-social imagination, BP has just screwed up the Gulf of Mexico for years to come, primarily because of (a) greed and impatience (b) capitalist cost-cutting on safety and environmental technology, and (c) technological hubris.

These are exactly the kinds of faults one might expect to see from a Promethean individual or a Promothean institution devoted to Ayn Rand’s moral and political principles: near-fatal mistakes arising from bad logic, arrogance and contempt for public opinion.

So I’d like to congratulate all of the libertarian ideologues at REASON for helping to promote a culture in which technological and economic folly of this magnitude can function. You’re probably right about the need for technical expertise to clean up the mess, and right again about the futility of politicians shouting at BP technicians to speed the cleanup along.

But who cares? If these people have all of this technolgical genius — if they share the stern and arrogant technical mastery of one of Ayn Rand’s heroes — why didn’t they stop the damned accident in the first place?

I love the proposal floating around Facebook on the plan to plug the spewing oil well with copies of “Atlas Strugged,” but I somehow don’t think you’re the people who are promoting it. It would be a great use for the pages of the book, though.

The politicians in Washington need to, as John Galt says in the novel, need to get out of the way.