And speaking of Massey, they should be a semester’s worth of study in themselves. If I wasn’t so repelled by Don Blankenship and his actions, I would probably be shaking my head in wonder and awe at what this guy has managed to pull off…with the complete cooperation of our leaders in Washington.[/quote]
Eavesdropper: I don’t work on the mine side, which is largely regulated by MSHA (the mine version of OSHA). I will give Obama credit for appointing a former senior union mine worker as head of MSHA, but West Virginia is apparently bought and paid for by Blankenship and Massey.
There are curious parallels between risk analysis, risk modeling and risk management in oil/gas and Wall Street and largely in that neither particular model works, nor has either model been tested in the real world, until the events of summer/fall 2008 (Wall Street with Bear, Lehman, et al.) and 2009 and 2010 (Tesoro, Massey and BP).
In a conversation with a Civil/Structural engineer at an unnamed oil company, he said that risk analysis “works until it doesn’t”. Sounds kind of goofy, but that is the prevailing attitude: “We’re comfortable with our risk analysis and risk management posture, until such time as the shit blows up”. Like I said, the parallels between Wall Street and the oil/gas companies are eerie. Both sides count on lawyers and lobbyists and highly paid engineering (or mathematics, in the case of Wall Street) consultants to come in and argue that these various companies did everything possible to analyze and mitigate risk and then they count on endless years spent in court, fending off plaintiffs.
