Offshore Safety

Nice piece by Dennis Bryant on Offshore Oil Spills and A Culture of Complacency:

It is incumbent upon the offshore oil and gas industry and its regulators to not only take the steps necessary to prevent another Deepwater Horizon casualty, but to adopt wholeheartedly a safety culture that will root out complacency. We are smart enough to develop technologies and processes that will significantly reduce risk. Only time will tell if we are smart enough to overcome the human fallacy of complacency in the face of those risks.

It's short and well worth the read.

I handled too many cases in which the following of proper safety procedures would have either prevented or mitigated the resulting harm.

There is a reason for checklists - they prevent "errors of complacency."