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By the Numbers: The Gulf Oil Spill

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Newsweek has created a great slideshow illuminating some staggering numbers about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. I suggest you head over there and read it in full as they include insightful synopses/explanations of each, but these were the few figures I found the most interesting:

  • Time it would take the United States to use the oil spilled so far: 4 hours, 24 minutes
  • Number of response workers: 42,000-plus
  • Percent of the spill that’s natural gas: 70%
  • Cubic feet of natural gas set ablaze: 1 billion
  • Number of suggestions received with ideas to stop the spill: 112,000

Along with that last factoid, Newsweek also included the below video of Kevin Costner talking about his invention that can siphon polluted water from the Gulf, extract the oil from it and dump the clean water back into the sea. He came up with this “oil distiller” while filming Waterworld when he — for God knows what reason — partnered with his brother to create an actual, working version of a prop used in the film. Obviously, the device did not need to work in the movie. It’s Hollywood make-believe and we viewers would have just believed that the theoretical physics they discussed worked considering it is, ya know, a movie set in the distant future that featured a plot where the globe was entirely submersed by ocean and “dry land was a myth.” But, nope, Kevin needed realism within his work of fiction, so the brothers Costner fabricated a working model of this centrifuge-based “Ocean Therapy” technology.

And now, hopefully, we will all owe the man a big round of applause. After conducting a few tests, BP purchased 32 of the machines from Costner a few weeks ago and has already begun using them to aid the clean up efforts. The technology is not perfect (as you can learn about here), but it is helping — which means Kevin has almost certainly done more to help the Gulf of Mexico, marine life and affected coastal communities than you have.

Overall, it’s easily the best thing he has done since Thirteen Days.

Safety, Economics and Rap

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As someone who actually listens to hip hop regularly, it is usually painful to see PSAs, commercials or really any organizational attempt to use rap as a method to appeal to the younger generations. The whole presentation and execution is usually just really, really poorly done and ends up just embarrassing the creators and, ironically, making them look old and out of touch in the process.

But once in a while, I actually come across a decent one — like this “Safety Rap” made by Dominion Virginia Power that I just found at the Risk and Safety Blog. The beat is very Dr. Dre and the hook is sort of catchy. Nice job.

This economic theory battle rap featuring the lyrical stylings of John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayekand F. A. Hayek is pretty good, too. Hayek can actually flow. Who knew?

George Costanza and Risk Management

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The most common thing I hear when I tell someone I’m an editor for a magazine about — and titled — risk management is “Ummm…What?” The second most common thing I hear is “Ohhh…Like Ben Stiller from Along Came Polly“? The third most common thing is “Do you work with George Costanza?”

Yes, for one glorious episode of Seinfeld, George had to learn about risk management while working for the New York Yankees and since that show is so ingrained in the public conscious, that is the only exposure that many people have had to the concept. (Click the link to watch George “educate” himself on the discipline.

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When I started out, I was no different. When I got into this job, I knew just as little as Costanza did.

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But ya know what? The more and more risk managers I meet, the more I realize that that is the most common way to enter the field.

Increasingly, kids are going to school to become risk managers and, someday, the pros in the field will less often say “I don’t know how I got into this role. I was a safety manager then I got promoted — that was 12 years ago.” But today, that’s the most common thing I hear when someone tells me how they got into risk management.

Don’t get me wrong — many of the best risk mangers I know arrived by accident. It’s just funny to think that almost everyone who now manages risk professionally once had a little George Costanza in them. Even me.

And just think, it only took eight short years for me to run into Kenny Bania in a coffee shop and hear him say, “I just stopped by to thank you. That risk management stuff you wrote for me is killer … It’s gold, Jared. Gold.”

What’s that? He said “Jerry”? And that wasn’t me? Oh.

Close enough.

Transportation in India: No Good Options

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india traffic

“Organized” chaos

A few weeks ago, a report came out that — once again — India led the world in traffic deaths. Given its population (estimated at nearly 1.2 billion, which puts it behind only China), the nation would logically be near the top of the list regardless of any priority it placed on safety. In fact, when India took over the number one spot for road fatalities (from China) in 2006, many people saw this as further evidence that India was truly becoming a economic power.

While having many of you citizens die on the road is obviously counterintuitive to progress, more people driving meant more people were buying cars because more people had more money. Safety needed to be improved, sure, but automobile transportation is always going to lead to some casualties that correlate to population and/or what percentage of that population has purchasing power great enough to afford a luxury like a car.

Anyone who subscribed to that theory five years ago, however, is probably starting to see India’s high death rate for what it is: tragic and avoidable. This New York Times article breaks it down.

While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.

A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population raise its importance on the world stage, the rising toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than a billion people safe.

In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, official figures for road deaths have been falling for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations.

It has been illustrated through various means time and time again, but this is just one more example of how India’s city planners and public officials are failing to provide adequate infrastructure to support the nation’s booming economy.

Unfortunately for Indians, roadways aren’t the only transportation problem. As you can see in the video below, the trains are not a much better option. Marked by overcrowding and delays, it takes workers who commute to the major cities an exorbitant effort just to make it to their jobs every day. Worse still, there are still many political and religious-based attacks on railways in many regions. The 2006 Mumbai bombings, for example, killed more than 200 and injured another 700.

A few weeks ago I went to the annual meeting of Coface, a company that specializes in international credit risk. As it does each year, Coface brought in a group of experts to talk about the most pressing global economic issues and professor David Denoon of New York University spoke about China and India, painting a much different development picture of the world’s two most populous locales.

China, he said, is characterized by places like Shanghai, where just in recent years alone construction has begun on more high rises than exist in all of Chicago. By contrast, he emphasized that the per capita income in India is merely $3,100. That’s equal to one-third of the average income in Brazil and one-fifth the average in Russia.

Looking at those numbers, it seems that both infrastructure and income distribution will pose a growing concern for the nation that puts the I in BRIC.*

* (The acronym for the world’s four biggest emerging economic powers, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Also, for a look at some of the risks that have plagued the largest Indian carmaker, check out Bill Coffin’s look at Tata Motors’ “Cheap Cars, Costly Protests.”)