It happens for a variety of reasons: a catastrophe occurs and people begin asking a lot of questions. Regardless whether this was an engineering blunder or not, I always ponder how we can make our equipment safer and simpler. There shouldn't be any kind of pride in using a difficult piece of machinery- the goal is to acquaint humanity with machines in the easiest way possible. If the disaster was caused because of a failure of protocol, there is really nothing that can be done, or is there?
The TransOcean spill was blamed on multiple fail-safes failing at the same time. How did these fail safes "fail"? Did teams forget to replace the parts? Was the maintenance of poor quality? Did engineers design "crap?". As much as we would like to pin the blame on the end user, I would much rather attack the equipment instead. What can we do to make our equipment safer? Pride set aside, did we do EVERYTHING in our power, as engineers, to prevent this disaster?
Hopefully down the road we can all learn from this disaster. It's going to cost someone a job and some corporation billions of dollars, but we went wrong somewhere. Where did it go wrong, exactly?
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