California oil refinery safety regulations approved

Embarrassment of Oversight An inescapable fact is that when an oversight agency has been embarrassed by the revelation of outrageous incompetence, lack of integrity, noncompliance, and/or lack of transparency by one overseen entity all similar overseen entities are punished in some way by the same and similar oversight agencies . Observation: Lack of competence, integrity, compliance, and/or transparency on the part of an overseen entity usually points to similar lacks on the part of the oversight entities. Quotation: “Hell hath no fury like an embarrassed bureaucrat.”-Old saying paraphrased Observation: Once the embarrassed agency gets over its initial outrage it settles into defensiveness, damage control, and distraction as if it had no sense of shame. Quotation: “…the reaction to Fukushima proves the old maxim that for nuclear power an accident anywhere is an accident everywhere .” Quotation: “An event anywhere in an industry can be an event everywhere in the industry.”-A nuclear industry saying generalized Observation: Sultana and Titanic resulted in enormous cost increases in the steamship business and continue to do so. Observation: Piper Alpha (1988) and Macondo (2010) resulted in enormous cost increases in the offshore oil business and continue to do so. Observation: The successful 2007 sting operation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was an embarrassing indication that NRC did not comply with its own internal requirements and that this noncompliance was not sufficiently transparent within the NRC. The 2016 repeat event in Texas is a further embarrassment. Quotation: “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”-Plato Observation: A cost-effective regulatory strategy is for the regulator to demand certificates of compliance and self-assessment of the deviations. A non-cost-effective strategy is “cops and robbers.” Quotation: Timothy J. Sloan, Wells Fargo’s chief, said, “To regain the trust we have lost, we must continue to be transparent with all our stakeholders and go beyond what has been asked of us by our regulators by reviewing all of our operations — leaving no stone unturned — so we can be confident we have done all that we can do to build a better, stronger Wells Fargo .” Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Investigative Practice (RAGAGIP): When you find upstream deception issues look for the downstream harmful conditions, behaviors, actions, and inactions that facilitated their success.