Disaster on the Horizon

Disaster on the Horizon PDF Author: Bob Cavnar
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603583173
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Disaster on the Horizon is a behind-the-scenes investigative look at the worst oil well accident in US history, which led to the current environmental and economic catastrophe on the Gulf Coast. Cavnar uses his 30 years in the business to take readers inside the disaster, exposing the decisions leading up to the blowout and the immediate aftermath. It includes personal accounts of the survivors, assembled from testimony during various investigations, as well as personal interviews with survivors, witnesses, and family. It also provides a layman's look at the industry, its technology, people, and risks. It deconstructs events and decisions made by BP, Transocean, and the US Government before and after the disaster, and the effects of those decisions, both good and bad. Cavnar explains what happened in the Gulf, explores how we arrived at deep water drilling in the first place and then charts a course for how to avoid these disasters in the future.

Disaster on the Horizon

Disaster on the Horizon PDF Author: Bob Cavnar
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603583173
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Disaster on the Horizon is a behind-the-scenes investigative look at the worst oil well accident in US history, which led to the current environmental and economic catastrophe on the Gulf Coast. Cavnar uses his 30 years in the business to take readers inside the disaster, exposing the decisions leading up to the blowout and the immediate aftermath. It includes personal accounts of the survivors, assembled from testimony during various investigations, as well as personal interviews with survivors, witnesses, and family. It also provides a layman's look at the industry, its technology, people, and risks. It deconstructs events and decisions made by BP, Transocean, and the US Government before and after the disaster, and the effects of those decisions, both good and bad. Cavnar explains what happened in the Gulf, explores how we arrived at deep water drilling in the first place and then charts a course for how to avoid these disasters in the future.

Deepwater Horizon

Deepwater Horizon PDF Author: Earl Boebert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545230
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
On April 20, 2010, the crew of the floating drill rig Deepwater Horizon lost control of the Macondo oil well forty miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Escaping gas and oil ignited, destroying the rig, killing eleven crew members, and injuring dozens more. The emergency spiraled into the worst human-made economic and ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history. Senior systems engineers Earl Boebert and James Blossom offer the most comprehensive account to date of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sifting through a mountain of evidence generated by the largest civil trial in U.S. history, the authors challenge the commonly accepted explanation that the crew, operating under pressure to cut costs, made mistakes that were compounded by the failure of a key safety device. This explanation arose from legal, political, and public relations maneuvering over the billions of dollars in damages that were ultimately paid to compensate individuals and local businesses and repair the environment. But as this book makes clear, the blowout emerged from corporate and engineering decisions which, while individually innocuous, combined to create the disaster. Rather than focusing on blame, Boebert and Blossom use the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures involved in the high-consequence enterprise of offshore drilling to illustrate a systems approach which contributes to a better understanding of how similar disasters emerge and how they can be prevented.

Fire on the Horizon

Fire on the Horizon PDF Author: Tom Shroder
Publisher: Harper
ISBN: 9780062063007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A real-life thriller in the tradition of The Perfect Storm In the spring of 2010 the world watched for weeks as more than 200 million gallons of crude oil billowed from a hole three miles deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Warnings of various and imminent environmental consequences dominated the news. Deepwater drilling—largely ignored or misunderstood to that point—exploded in the American consciousness in the worst way possible. Fire on the Horizon, written by veteran oil rig captain John Konrad and longtime Washington Post journalist Tom Shroder, recounts in vivid detail the life of the rig itself, from its construction in South Korea in the year 2000 to its improbable journey around the world to its disastrous end, and reveals the day-to-day lives, struggles, and ambitions of those who called it home. From the little-known maritime colleges to Transocean's training schools and Houston headquarters to the small towns all over the country where the wives and children of the Horizon's crew lived in the ever-present shadow of risk hundreds of miles away, Fire on the Horizon offers full-scale portraits of the Horizon's captain, its chief mate, its chief mechanic, and others. What emerges is a white-knuckled chronicle of engineering hubris at odds with the earth itself, an unusual manifestation of corporate greed and the unforgettable heroism of the men and women on board the Deepwater Horizon. Here is the harrowing minute-by-minute account of the fateful day, April 20, 2010, when the half-billion-dollar rig blew up, taking with it the lives of eleven people and leaving behind a swath of unprecedented natural destruction.

Black Beaches and Bayous

Black Beaches and Bayous PDF Author: Lisa A. Eargle
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761859799
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Black Beaches and Bayous: The BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Disaster provides a multidisciplinary, international perspective on one of the major disaster events within the United States during the last ten years. Scholars from various disciplines including sociology, political science, ecology, psychology, and criminal justice investigate the different components and issues associated with this event. The contributors address topics such as the social and historical context of fossil fuel use, steps within the technological disaster process, and similarities and differences between this disaster and other technological disasters. They also discuss the social and psychological impacts on Gulf Coast residents, the transformation of natural ecological systems, changes in risk assessment, and media portrayals of the Obama administration and its response to this disaster.

Framing Environmental Disaster

Framing Environmental Disaster PDF Author: Melissa K. Merry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113627412X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon and subsequent underground oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 is considered by many to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Interest groups, public officials, and media organizations have spent considerable time documenting the economic and ecological impacts of this spill as well as the causes of the spill, ostensibly to prevent future disasters of this magnitude. However, rather than an unbiased search for answers, such investigations involve strategic efforts by a variety of political actors to define the spill and its causes in ways that lead to their preferred policy solutions. Framing Environmental Disaster evaluates the causal stories that environmental groups tell about the spill and develops theoretical propositions about the role of such stories in the policy process. Which actors do groups hold responsible, and how do groups use blame attributions to advance their policy agendas? Constructing a creative methodological approach which includes content analysis drawn from blog posts, emails, press releases, and testimony before Congress and insights and quotations drawn from interviews with environmental group representatives, Melissa K. Merry argues that interest groups construct causal explanations long before investigations of policy problems are complete and use focusing events to cast blame for a wide range of harms not directly tied to the events themselves. In doing so, groups seek to take full advantage of “windows of opportunity” resulting from crises. An indispensable resource for scholars of public policy and environmental politics and policy, this book sheds new light on the implications of the gulf disaster for energy politics and policies while advancing scholarly understandings of the role of framing and causal attribution in the policy process.

In Deep Water

In Deep Water PDF Author: Peter Lehner
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 1935928090
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
"First published by OR Books LLC, New York"--T.p. verso.

Horizon Work

Horizon Work PDF Author: Adriana Petryna
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691264813
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A new way of thinking about the climate crisis as an exercise in delimiting knowable, and habitable, worlds As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, Earth’s fragile ecosystems are growing increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Horizon Work explores how climate change is disrupting our fundamental ability to project how the environment will act over time, and how these rapidly faltering predictions are colliding with the dangerous new realities of emergency response. Anthropologist Adriana Petryna examines the climate crisis through the lens of “horizoning,” a mode of reckoning that considers unnatural disasters against a horizon of expectation in which people and societies can act. She talks to wildfire scientists who, amid chaotic fire seasons and shifting fire behaviors, are revising predictive models calibrated to conditions that no longer exist. Petryna tells the stories of wildland firefighters who could once rely on memory of previous fires to gauge the behaviors of the next. Trust in patterns has become an occupational hazard. Sometimes, the very concept of projection becomes untenable. Yet if all we see is doom, we will overlook something crucial about the scientific and ethical labor needed to hold back climate chaos. Here is where the work of horizoning begins. From experiments probing our planetary points of no return to disaster ecologies where the stark realities of climate change are being confronted, Horizon Work reveals how this new way of thinking has the power to reverse harmful legacies while turning voids where projection falters into spaces of collective action and recoverable futures.

Case Studies in Organizational Communication

Case Studies in Organizational Communication PDF Author: Steve May
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452263884
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The Second Edition of Case Studies in Organizational Communication: Ethical Perspectives and Practices, by Dr. Steve May, integrates ethical theory and practice to help strengthen readers' awareness, judgment, and action in organizations by exploring ethical dilemmas in a diverse range of well-known business cases.

3.11

3.11 PDF Author: Richard J. Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801468027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the shockwaves of a 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake originating less than 50 miles off its eastern coastline. The most powerful earthquake to have hit Japan in recorded history, it produced a devastating tsunami with waves reaching heights of over 130 feet that in turn caused an unprecedented multireactor meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This triple catastrophe claimed almost 20,000 lives, destroyed whole towns, and will ultimately cost hundreds of billions of dollars for reconstruction.In 3.11, Richard Samuels offers the first broad scholarly assessment of the disaster's impact on Japan's government and society. The events of March 2011 occurred after two decades of social and economic malaise—as well as considerable political and administrative dysfunction at both the national and local levels—and resulted in national soul-searching. Political reformers saw in the tragedy cause for hope: an opportunity for Japan to remake itself. Samuels explores Japan's post-earthquake actions in three key sectors: national security, energy policy, and local governance. For some reformers, 3.11 was a warning for Japan to overhaul its priorities and political processes. For others, it was a once-in-a-millennium event; they cautioned that while national policy could be improved, dramatic changes would be counterproductive. Still others declared that the catastrophe demonstrated the need to return to an idealized past and rebuild what has been lost to modernity and globalization.Samuels chronicles the battles among these perspectives and analyzes various attempts to mobilize popular support by political entrepreneurs who repeatedly invoked three powerfully affective themes: leadership, community, and vulnerability. Assessing reformers’ successes and failures as they used the catastrophe to push their particular agendas—and by examining the earthquake and its aftermath alongside prior disasters in Japan, China, and the United States—Samuels outlines Japan’s rhetoric of crisis and shows how it has come to define post-3.11 politics and public policy.

Blowout in the Gulf

Blowout in the Gulf PDF Author: William R. Freudenburg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262294087
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The story of how a chain of failures, missteps, and bad decisions led to America's biggest environmental disaster. On April 20, 2010, the gigantic drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven crew members and causing a massive eruption of oil from BP's Macondo well. For months, oil gushed into the Gulf, spreading death and destruction. Americans watched real-time video of the huge column of oil and gas spewing from the obviously failed “blowout preventer.” What was missing, though, was the larger story of this disaster. In Blowout in the Gulf, energy experts William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling explain both the disaster and the decisions that led up to it. Blowout in the Gulf weaves a fascinating narrative of failures, missteps, and bad decisions, explaining why this oil spill was a disaster waiting to happen—and how making better energy choices will help prevent others like it.