Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill History Article Critique

Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill
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Deep Water Horizon Oil spill
The Deep Water Horizon disaster intensified the concern of oil spill safety within the U.S. coastal waters; with the April 2010 mega marine explosion event resulting in eleven employee deaths and an approximate spillage of 4.9 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico. This phenomenon climaxed in numerous congress hearings, probes, and media coverage. Multiple investigations initiated over the Deep Water Horizon blowout indicate copious causal factors including, organizational deviance and the organizational structural breakdown.
Kurtz (2013) postulates that the normalization of deviance that is manifest in several organizations leads to dangerous incidents. He says that decisions viewed as unseemly, precarious, and unscrupulous are in a way disregarded within the BP organization. Such meager indifferences from conventional procedural operations become fixated within an institutional structure as an obviously 'taken for granted' part of organizational processes. Such divergences happen due to the leadership granting such patterns to staff, as 'an end justifying the means' protocol. These patterns also promote bypasses, which involve overt decision-making leading to organizational misconduct and goal displacement. The indifferences may stretch for a while overlooked but become amplified during emergencies and crises, which result in disasters and organizational breakdown. Before the Deep water Horizon, the Mineral Management Services years earlier, acting as the lead oversight agency. They were summoned for various violations including; fraudulent malpractices, ethical infractions, gaudy safety implementations, and tacky record keeping. These actions created a pattern of organizational deviance that climaxed within the agency. Inquiries registered the evidence of poor risk management, a last-minute revision of plans, and inadequate response, and organizational bureaucratic flaws (Broder, 2011). Studies show that the chain of operations associated with the drilling expedition such as drilling methods, transportation, spill prevention, and response, participated in the calamitous explosion. Studies put the Transocean rig management at fault for leadership laxity before the spill. The employees were not well equipped with the requisite safety and emergency training, which resulted in the loss of life.
Role of policy and legalities in the disaster
From the investigations, there are evident indicative patterns of the causal factors, which include the public policy administration. The public policy authorizes governmental enactments as the driving force to limit oil spills in the U.S. littoral waters. The initial federal statute that discusses the oil spills on the U.S. shoreline was The Oil Pollution Act of 1924 (33 U.S.C. 431-437). Pollution control stipulations for water masses contained in the 1899 act allowed the Corps of Engineers to regulate the spillage of offshore waste. The shortcomings of the US statutory progress were apparent after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which played a role in the endangered spill restriction system of the US coastal waters. Existing provisions such as the Endangered spec...