Rhinocrisy

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Liberation, the U.S. has spent about $410 billion on the war. The head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office has said it will cost at least $1 trillion. Iraq had 26 million people in it at the beginning. So far, the U.S. has spent about $15,800 per Iraqi. In a country where the per-capita income in 2003 was about $255. The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years. Meanwhile Iraq would still have functioning industries, farms and infrastructure, which would give people there a much higher quality of life.

If the killing rates found in last year’s Johns Hopkins study have continued, about 730,000 Iraqis have now been killed, along with the UN’s new estimate of 2 million refugees. So to calculate it another way, the U.S. has spent about $562,000 per Iraqi killed. Which is pretty efficient compared to, say, California’s death penalty, which costs the state about $250 million per corpse, according to the LA Times (cited at Death Penalty Focus).

The next-generation U.S. bomber should be outfitted with bomb bays that release $20 bills. I am not joking.

I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”

It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.

For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:

the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”

And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”

I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”

Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….

Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….

California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.

I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.