If corporate boards and CEOs can interfere in US elections, they should be subject to prison, like any other ‘person’.
That is safety; that is cost/benefit analysis. As long as it is cheaper to pay fines when the kill people or the environment, there is no reason for them to care.
]]>And a safety engineer’s job was not necessarily to make procedures safer (though some of that did go on) but to make sure blame for mishaps was assigned elsewhere. Contractor companies, the kind that work on drilling sites, were a frequent target for blame, and I can’t even say the safety folks were wrong about that.
The most amusing concept I was ever asked to write code for had to do with “exceedances”: spills, etc. The concept, invented (I think) by one of the safety engineers, was “opportunities for exceedance.” [ExceedAnce? ExceedEnce? I could never get a straight answer, and it’s not in my dictionary.] Anyway, the safety guy’s idea was to divide the actual number of spills on a site by the maximum number of spills you could allow to occur before the guvmint charged you with a violation. It made for a smaller number to use in presentations to the suits. “CYA” is far too kind a description…
]]>If an area isn’t used to earthquakes, the buildings aren’t designed for them, so even small quakes will have very bad results in terms of damage and injuries.
]]>The UK may not be prone to big earthquakes (the biggest ever on land is about Mag 5 and offshore Mag 6 as happened in the North Sea in the 30s) but there is no doubt tat something like fracking could open old faults. Something we should think twice about.
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