June 15, 2010

Honesty

By: AF Editors

Steven Hayward:

This article needs to begin with a big mea culpa. In the April 26 edition of The Weekly Standard (which went to press on April 16), I wrote: “Improvements in drilling technology have greatly reduced the risk of the kind of offshore spill that occurred off Santa Barbara in 1969. .??.??. To fear oil spills from offshore rigs is analogous to fearing air travel now because of prop plane crashes in the 1950s.” On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded, touching off the worst oil spill in American history.

Ouch. I’ve understandably been receiving indignant emails from environmentalists wondering whether I care to opine about the seaworthiness of the Titanic while I’m at it. The basic point was nonetheless correct. While we still don’t know the precise cause of the failure of the blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon (a technology that has successfully prevented spills in more than 150 offshore drilling accidents over the last 40 years), early accounts suggest that the same factors that cause most airplane crashes came into play: complacency and sloppy maintenance.

Don’t feel too bad, Steve. Barack Obama made the same mistake.