UA panel: Gulf oil spill proves fail-safe strengths

Marty Matlock (left), a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and Petrofac founder Ralph Martin, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemical engineering from the university, answer questions Friday about the recent Gulf oil spill during a discussion at the UA Bell Engineering building.
Marty Matlock (left), a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and Petrofac founder Ralph Martin, who earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in chemical engineering from the university, answer questions Friday about the recent Gulf oil spill during a discussion at the UA Bell Engineering building.

— The Gulf oil spill is an example of how human failings can override multiple layers of system safety features, members of a university discussion panel concluded Friday.

A chain of events in which about five things went wrong preceded the deadly and environmentally catastrophic blowout of BP’s offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, panelists at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Gulf Oil Colloquium told a campus audience.

“Somehow the cement didn’t hold,” said Ralph Martin of Tyler, Texas, founder and former chief executive officer of Petrofac and a UA alumnus.

Then, two different check valves failed, as did two blowout “preventers,” said Martin, who retired in 2004.

He and other panelists said that, had any one of those fail-safes done their job, the disaster might have never happened. And they wondered whether people had broken or bent any rules when dealing with the equipment that later failed.

Working in a risky work environment is not unlike people getting in their cars every day and hurtling along at 70 mph without givingmuch thought to the risk potential, Marty Matlock, a professor of biological and ecological engineering at UA.

“Systemic threats are what we operate on at any moment,” he said. “Our ability to manage risk is greater than our action of managing risk.

Stephen M. Sheppard, UA’s William H. Enfield Professor of Law and specialist in international and environmental law, likened the oil rig failure to five drivers who are only “slightly speeding” on the highway, but who nonetheless cause a five-car pileup.

“Like many of these events where many of these systems fail, we build these systemswith a lot of redundancy and oversight - so it takes a lot of things to go wrong,” Sheppard said. “Unfortunately, a lot of things do go wrong sometimes. ... It takes people to prevent that, and generally it takes a lot of people who don’t get along to do that.”

This works in reverse, as well, he said.

“I believe very firmly that the reason we have had so few events of great magnitude ... is that the human factor is the strength, not the weak link,” Sheppard said. “It all depends on the people in the system.”

Martin agreed.

“There’s something like 3,400 platforms like this in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “On those 3,400 platforms, there are over 30,000 oil wells. Shows you how rare it is.”

Martin continued: “This is the first disaster there we’ve had like this - but when it does happen, it is a disaster.”

The April 20 explosion killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, and the cleanup continues.

Nature can never go back to the way it was when this kind of disruption occurs, Matlock said.

“Ecosystems never recover - ecosystems never return to where they were before an event,” he said, though response to change itself is part of the ecosystem’s behavior. “Ecosystems restore function.” This summer, Matlock and some of his undergraduates conducted some studies on the spill’s economic and ecological impacts.

“We are 95 percent confident that the costs are $8 billion,” he said, describing the financial harm for this year only.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 13 on 10/30/2010

Upcoming Events