Disaster management cycle of brent spar essay
The advance of technology and exposure to the hostile marine environment will usually have rendered the structures out of date, too expensive to maintain, or both—as in the case of the Brent Spar. Press comments indicate that it also had difficulties with its passive joint-venture partner, Exxon, as well as poor communications with its trade associations who, with one exception, left Shell to fight its own public affairs battle.
Over the succeeding days and weeks anyone who cared to watch, read or listen was bombarded with a mass of information and misinformation.
Copyright Tony Rice and Paula Owen Acknowledgements This book started life as two separate works, one from the slightly detached point of view of an environmental information specialist, the other from that of a deep sea biologist who became embroiled in the public arguments surrounding the Brent Spar during the summer of Because of their toxicity, the use of PCBs is now banned, but until the mid—s they were used in a variety of situations, particularly in electrical fittings.
If the planned deep-sea disposal of the Spar had gone ahead, of course, these disagreements would never have been resolved. To address these factors the Commission identified a series of specific steps through which any licence applicant would have to go.
A second round of dialogue seminars was arranged in the autumn of How often do the direct actions of the person in the street bring a major industrial organisation to its knees? What about the business of precedent?
During the operation, the Spar buoy was found to Copyright Tony Rice and Paula Owen be overstressed by the pressures it experienced. Violent storms can blow up within an hour and can last for days.
Within a decade the North Sea oil industry was constructing production installations that ten years previously had been considered impossibly ambitious.
Disaster management cycle of brent spar essay
As far as Shell is concerned, it has been a major public relations disaster. How could the two sides have such differing views on what was in the Spar, and, more importantly, on what it would do if it were dumped on the bottom of the deep sea? If the Spar, tanks entirely filled, could have been hung from a giant spring balance it would have weighed in at about 65, tonnes. Even in the absence of the broader global argument, the European dimension makes the Brent Spar story worth looking at again for lessons that might help to avoid the same or similar consequences next time. Why rake over the coals yet again? Greenpeace has exposed the key weakness of decentralised management — portraying one subsidiary as being insensitive to others and the company as divided against itself. This system consisted of a 24in-diameter pipe laid on the seabed to carry the Brent oil to the Sullom Voe terminal in Shetland. If the occupation could be achieved, it would also provide superb environmental publicity leading up to the fourth North Sea Conference of Environment Ministers from countries bordering the North Sea planned for early June What is each project's single-cycle NPV? Shell and the UK government took the view that as the relevant market was British, it was only necessary to inform the other countries who share the North Sea.But since PCBs were still in widespread use when the Spar was built, it assumed, probably correctly, that the fittings originally installed would have contained PCBs in their capacitors.
Before it was installed in the Brent field, the Spar had to be gradually up-ended to the vertical by slowly ballasting the storage tanks; this nine-day operation took place in a Norwegian fjord.