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John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad - I wrote a book on the BP oil disaster, & there’s a critical parallel with ICE protests in Minnesota that almost everyone is missing.
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When the Deepwater Horizon explosion dominated Twitter for months, the narrative was simple: BP cut corners on safety.
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That story was comforting.
It was also wrong. Dead wrong.
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The disaster wasn’t caused by too little safety.
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It was caused by safetyism.
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Before the explosion, HR and HSE departments overwhelmingly filled with women who couldn't worked a dangerous job in their life became obsessed with eliminating all injuries offshore. Not major hazards. Not catastrophic risk. ALL injuries, even minor cuts & bruises.
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Tens of millions of dollars.
Thousands of hours of paperwork.
Endless training modules.
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Everyone,from dishwasher to captain, was empowered to shut down a drilling operation costing millions per day to prevent a sprained ankle.
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Meanwhile, people with deep technical expertise, guys who actually understood blowout risk, were sidelined or fired for saying the obvious:
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That HR induced exhaustion causes accidents.
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That drowning crews in paperwork makes them miss real danger.
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That spending money on back-injury training means less money preventing explosions.
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Like the protesters in Minnesota, HR and Safety became powerful, organized, coordinated via expensive software, mobile & completely detached from reality.
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One crewman reported a serious onboard fire that nearly killed someone. Nothing happened for weeks. When he kept pushing a manager told him to STFU.
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He called HR to report the “verbal abuse.”
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Within hours, an executive helicopter full of HR Quick Reaction Team launched from Houston.
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They didn’t investigate the fire.
They investigated him, the guy who called HR.
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Their conclusion?
The man reporting the fire was “repeatedly harassing the crew to report the fire.”
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He was fired.
A company-wide HR memo publicly shamed him.
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All in the name of “safety.”
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Here’s the truth they refused to accept: offshore drilling is dangerous. You cannot extract tens of millions of barrels of oil without injuries & yes, sometimes death.
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Now apply that lesson to Minnesota.
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Law enforcement is dangerous.
You cannot deport tens of millions of people without injuries & yes, sometimes death.
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Yes, Renee Good was shot.
Yes, Alex Pretti was shot.
Yes, ICE operations result in injuries.
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And yes more people will be hurt by ICE this year.
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But HR didn’t eliminate injuries offshore. They just reclassified them for statistics, exhausted the workforce, and made people afraid to report real problems setting the stage for a major explosion.
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That’s exactly what’s happening now.
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ICE agents are being forced to waste time protecting identities, managing feelings, navigating activist “volunteers” & hesitating rather than acting decisively when seconds matter.
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Every minute an agent loses sleep worrying about this is a minute less rested.
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Every hour spent on crowd-management training is an hour not spent on training to manage violent criminals.
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And worse..
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I’m a ship captain. I was trained to make the hardest choice: to do the most good for the most people. I was taught that one day I might have to send a fire team into a space they won’t come back from to buy passengers ten more minutes to reach lifeboats.
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That’s the job.
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Numbers matter.
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Yes, Renee Good was shot. That’s tragic.
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But it pales next to the hundreds killed by violent illegal immigrants under Biden.
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It’s nothing compared to the thousands who died between the Darién Gap and Mexico.
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It’s microscopic compared to the 400,000 fentanyl deaths many in ICUs like the one Alex Pretti worked in.
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