Thursday, March 5, 2020

THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF CARE AND CAUTION

The right amount of caution:
My father being an electrical engineer caused me to consider what engineering means. I learned that you have to make sure the material and the construction create a finished item that can withstand the use it will be put to. (Sorry for stilted wording.) I don't know if Dad told me this, but I have the thought from very young of the testing of material and the prototypes, planes and wings, etc vibrating in wind  tunnels in flight speed conditions for testing.
Also, my father-in-law was a bricklaying  contractor and builder; and my husband told of Papaw's regular decision to do his work extremely well using very strongly formulated mortar, wetting the bricks before starting and otherwise doing the BEST work (and organizing the work and leading his employees in this, also.)
I even remember fussing at my son when he was a child and playing too hard with a toy one time, telling him "you don't have to break a toy (or other) to find out how strong it is or is not."  Actually, I guess I was also influenced by working for a foundation engineering company, testing  samples for strength by putting them under a load and recording how much load that sample could carry before it would fail and noting that after sample started to break, it could never be as strong as before, unless it had no original cohesion to begin with.
I compare my father-in-law's building ethics to the business decisions that were made concerning the crucial parts of the monstrous offshore oil platform (Deep water Horizon) and drilling machines that failed in 2010 causing ** deaths and the ruination of a large area of Gulf of Mexico and the  Gulf coast.  Who all were the decision makers? Are there still trials going on? Do those ones yet realize that they made bad (sinful, even) decisions that caused the catastrophe? What was the risk that they decided was ok that turned out to not be ok? Why did they think it was ok to make the decision they did? I guess they never thought that they would encounter a situ where blowout preventers would be needed. Was that realistic? I think I heard that one aspect of that catastrophe was that the drilling mud was not heavy enough. Was that a combination of two or more mistakes (or sinful decisions) that did not take into account that other imperfections would make the whole array totally insufficient?
So now I think about secret poor decisions. The people  responsible for choosing those insufficient blowout preventers, or the people who manufactured, misrepresented and sold them thought their decision would remain a secret. They thought it would be ok.

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