Exceeding Our Competence

Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via Flickr

Technology Thursday

The disaster in the Gulf has been riveting - in a truly horrifying way. It shows us that our reach exceeds our grasp, insofar as we undertake activities that have catastrophic (albeit--hopefully--rare) failure modes that we don't know how to cope with. The risks we are willing to take, in other words, exceed our risk mitigation and disaster management capabilities. As the toxic oil and gas continues to gush into the Gulf (at the rate, some suggest, of one Exxon Valdez very 2-3 days; some suggest much less and there's controversy over the calculation, regardless), most of us can only sit and watch, stunned, as images of encroaching devastation approach vital coastlines.

After 9/11, the singer-songwriter Bob Hillman wrote a song about the World Trade Center attacks and the towers falling. In it, he sang about being far away and watching the same image over and over on the television:

I saw the Trade Center fall on TV
Fall on TV
I turned it on coincidentally
It happened to you like it happened to me
I saw the Trade Center fall on TV

I see them falling again and again
Again and again
Over nine hundred times through the long weekend
Somewhere inside was a friend of a friend
I see them falling again and again

San Francisco's perfect view
Of downtown New York City through a
Cable-ready picture tube
Calibrated expertly to
Render unequivocally
Something I don't want to see

Another singer-songwriter, A.J. Roach, wrote a song--a protest song, really, called "Mighty Jehovah"--about the Iraq War a few years ago. A stanza from it was:

God he don't see no borders and there ain't no side he claims
He just sees the hearts you've ruined, the lives you've ended in his name
Love of God and love of country, love of power and love of greed,
You can watch it all unravel on a 24-hour live video screen

As I reload the nauseating images and accounts coming from the Gulf and watch video coverage of the unfolding tragedy, these lines keep popping into my head. In my lifetime, we have had far too many "Where were you when..." moments. And yet we are so distanced, those of us not on the affected coasts right now. Still, television, video, blogs, and live data feeds bring it into our living rooms and offices, creating a push and pull of passive despair that feels active somehow, because we keep clicking and watching and clicking and reading and ranting and sputtering in little 140-character bursts of rage.

I crossed the Potomac on the Metro this morning--it looked perfectly normal. Earlier this month I was on Virginia Beach and the ocean was there in its vastness, but looking like I expected. I cannot imagine what it must be like for the people who live on the water in the Gulf States, watching the oncoming oil slicks and knowing that sense of inevitable futility. As I wrote this, I don't know if BP's attempted "top kill" strategy will work to finally (FINALLY) stop the gusher, but even if it does, the damage seems so extensive. The satellite images are astonishing. The tools that we apparently have to battle the poison seem so minuscule. People are washing tortoises and birds by hand, one at a time. THey are using normal sized garden rakes to try to scrape oil and tar balls off the beaches.

Things like this man-made and now seemingly unstoppable disaster demonstrate unequivocally the limits of our engineering competence. It seems impossible, thought, for us a society to learn from and accept these limitations. And the demand for oil grows each day. Reporter Mac Mclelland from Mother Jones is on site. She writes:

When I joke with one worker that he should pocket the solid gobs of oil he's digging up to show me how far beneath the sand they go, he stops dead and asks me if BP's still trying to use the oil they all collect. "Aw, I knew it!" he says. Another leans on his rake to ask me, "Have they at least shut the oil off yet?" He randomly picks three spots in a three-foot-wide expanse of sand that he's already raked clean and drops his rake in an inch deeper to show me how the oil bubbles up from underneath. He can't count how many times he's raked this same spot in the 33 hours he's worked it since Thursday, but one thing he's sure of, he says, is that he'll be standing right here tomorrow and the next day, too.

The Big Picture, as usual, has also had some amazing coverage here and here. Let's hope this week's attempt to plug up the leak works. We'll all be watching.