Blacks, Engineers and the BP Oil Spill
By Wiley A. Hall 3rd
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“When a tragedy like this happens, people living outside the area, like me, get the work. But the people who live there don’t.”
— Pamela Bingham, Bingham Consulting Services
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In the end, the death of BP’s runaway gushing oil well seemed anticlimactic, as though the public had grown too exhausted by the months-long struggle to kill the beast to feel much triumph over its final demise.
Or maybe people sensed that although the beast was dead, the fight had only begun.
Indeed, months have passed. Scientists and government review boards are probing the ecological and financial effects of the disaster. Politicians are grandstanding. The companies involved are pointing fingers. The people who made their living on the now-tainted waters are growing increasingly concerned that their needs are getting short shrift.
The only thing anyone seems to know for certain is that there remains a price to be paid for the series of mistakes and mishaps that produced one of the largest and costliest environmental disasters in U.S. history.
Oh, and one more thing: whatever the final reckoning, the lion’s share of the tab will likely be borne by people of color.
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David Graves and Regina Easley label water sample bottles. The samples were collected using a device called a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth) rosette.
Photo Credit: NOAA
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Emulsified oil remains on, and pooled below, vegetation in Pass a Loutre, La., following a previous week's storm, May 22, 2010.
Photo Credit: NOAA
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Booms made out of pom-poms are set to protect the sandy beach area at Fourchon Beach, La., May 27, 2010.
Photo Credit: NOAA
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Invisible Victims
NSBE member Pamela Bingham, principal of Bingham Consulting Services, is an environmental engineer and a native of Mississippi. Since 2006, she has been working on proposals to retrain people affected by Hurricane Katrina in jobs related to coastal restoration and environmental protection. She says members of minority groups — particularly African Americans and Hispanics — are the invisible victims of the spill.
“When a tragedy like this happens, people living outside the area, like me, get the work. But the people who live there don’t. They always get hit hardest.”
“Remember, we’re talking about the Deep South, and we’re not that far from segregation and sharecropping,” Bingham continues. “A lot of the people down there are very much involved in subsistence fishing or have hourly jobs in the energy industry. They’re the people who can least afford to lose their work.”
The American Association of Blacks in Energy, based in Washington, D.C., is working on a position paper on the impact of the oil spill on people of color. The association’s executive director, Frank Stewart, notes two seemingly contradictory facts: blacks along the Gulf Coast in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas have some of the lowest per capita incomes in the country. Yet the employment in energy-related jobs is heavy there, albeit at the service sector level. This means decision-makers who care about such issues will have to engage in a delicate balancing act, weighing the need for reform against the need for jobs, knowing all the while that anything they decide may have a disproportionately harmful impact on blacks.
“Nothing is ever one-sided, and everything is complicated,” Stewart says. “I would hope the federal government and others will take time to think through the consequences of their actions very carefully.”
Ethics Count
Dr. Calvin Mackie, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and lifetime member of NSBE, is writing a book about leadership and the disaster. He says the spill raises ethical questions that engineers rarely like to face.
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“Engineering disasters occur when the technical people take
shortcuts.”
— Calvin Mackie, Ph.D.
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“Ethics in engineering matters,” he says. “Engineering disasters occur when the technical people take shortcuts.”
Yet Mackie, who lectures all over the country, says black students seldom seem interested in talking about the ethical dimensions of their profession. “They’re concerned with ‘Can I get a job?’ and ‘How much money will I make?’ It’s our responsibility to turn the conversation to ethics, character and morals. That’s why you see so many professional engineers so unhappy, hopping around from job to job. They’re too focused on trying to make a living and not enough on trying to make a life.”
Says Mackie, “I tell students that the last five years have shown us the future of engineering. Between Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, we’ve seen the needs of the world played out before us."
“There are only two places you can make money: either creating disasters or new innovations, or cleaning them up. And people of color, who are the main victims of those who create the disasters, should be leading the way in terms of cleaning them up.”
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