Truly an award-worthy use of the word "notwithstanding":Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, awarded millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives after “the best year in safety performance in our company’s history,” according to an annual report and proxy statement released yesterday.
“Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate,” Transocean states in the filing. “As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our Company’s history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere.”
I can't help but worry that it /was/ an exemplary year of safety, even taking Deepwater Horizon into account. That bodes poorly for their normal levels of safety.
Does it though? We know they're in a dangerous business. We'd need comparable figures to see whether other people who do this are better or worse. My country's track workers (ie people whose work unavoidably involves them being near fast moving trains) would be overjoyed to report six months with no life-threatening accidents. Meanwhile in accountancy this record would and should be unremarkable.
I guess it's a question of how you measure the severity. As noted, their metric is "total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate", and the value of that is entirely dependent on what "recordable" and "potential severity" actually mean. Objectively, doing untold damage to the local (and not-so-local) environment *plus* loss of life *plus* loss of sweet, sweet hydrocarbons seems like a pretty high severity incident, but if their measure of "potential severity" is "well, we could have caved in the entire seabed in the Gulf", then sure, they did well by that measure. Not to be callous about it, but I think the immediate fatalities were actually the smallest part of this incident, objectively speaking.
"Dude! It was just the one time!"
"total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate"
A.K.A. Lies, damn lies and statistics.
Update: Transocean execs donate bonuses to charity.