Engineering’s Shame

A telling sign of the now 'Higher Education' Industry Mills cranking out those pieces of papers saying intelligence with bodies attached. Many of those bodies shouldn't be. Those who were really qualified and sought that which was needed to better their professional skills they wanted are just bodies within the masses of others, to theirs and ours loss!

The Gulf Oil-Spill Disaster Is Engineering’s Shame

They’ve already started recovering the corpses of oil-poisoned dolphins, sea turtles and birds from the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Another casualty in this slowly unfolding catastrophe is the reputation of the engineering profession—and not just petroleum and oil-drilling platform engineers, who certainly have much to regret about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The disaster affects the reputation of all engineers.

What’s happening now in the Gulf is another failure for a profession already deeply afflicted with an identity crisis and which questions its role in U.S. society. Part of the problem stems from much-publicized disasters of years past, like the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Five short years after the flooding of New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is prompting questions about the failure of engineers either to foresee risks or invent a quick fix.

Blame engineers for some of the mess; certainly BP engineers failed to see the need for viable backups for blowout preventers. Engineers also failed to stand up for higher-cost measures that might have headed off the trouble just before the explosion. Continued