Don’t know about you, but I’ll never look at an airplane window quite the same way again.
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There we were, suspended in a slow-moving maybe/maybe not-disaster at GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove, where a cracked tank full of the chemical used to make airplane windows may or may not have blown, or leaked, or produced noxious clouds. Authorities say all’s good, but there are doubters. Is the threat really gone?
We had hoped to come to you today with more answers to the questions plaguing us — who made that tank? why did its cooling system stop working? why didn’t GKN have a dependable backup for that system? etc.
But that will take more time.
Until then, can we simply agree that government’s most important job is to keep people safe? For so long, to so many, official protection has meant well-staffed police and fire departments — but never, ever, more inspectors with clipboards. Over-regulation strangles the economy! The free market does the job far more efficiently than government intervention!
Really?
Disasters often seem to spring from the lack of outside eyeballs, weak enforcement of rules, and businesses left to essentially regulate themselves.
There are more than a dozen other businesses in California that use the same chemical at the center of the incident at GKN, and nearly 330,000 others that work with some types of hazardous chemicals under the auspices of the California Environmental Protection Agency and its many arms.
More than 126,000 of those companies have had violations, according to CalEPA data. Much as GKN had.
GKN paid nearly $1 million to settle environmental violations with the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 2021, including failing to keep emission records, operating unpermitted equipment and modifying permitted equipment without the agency’s blessing.
So you wonder: Is there more that government can and should be doing on the oversight and enforcement side of things?
Might some investment in oversight reduce the need for terrifying emergency operations like the one we’ve all just endured (under an intense international spotlight) for the past week?
Let’s revisit a series of high-profile failures — some involving money, some involving lives, some involving both — over our not-so-distant past.
Anybody watching?
We’ll start with Orange County’s bankruptcy in 1994. County Treasurer-Tax Collector Bob Citron was allowed to borrow huge sums of public money to make wildly speculative bets on the market; there was no regulatory mechanism to oversee that at all, save a handful of county officials who were no match for the Merrill Lynch salesmen pitching exotic investments. That particular dearth of oversight cost Orange County taxpayers a cool $1.64 billion.
America’s Great Recession of 2008? “The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down,” the New York Times reported in September of that year.
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A few years later, San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station spent $670 million on massive new steam generators designed to boost electricity output at the plant. San Onofre’s operator, Southern California Edison, told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the new generators (which lasted less than two years), were essentially the same as the old generators (which lasted 25 years).
But they were not the same. The new generators packed in many more tubes, which led to quicker wear, which led to a leak of radioactive steam. “It’s like taking a Model T and slapping a V-8 engine in it,” a critic said at the time. “Southern California Edison didn’t want to admit they were dramatically different, because that would open up a license amendment, and the public would get involved.” San Onofre’s reactors powered off forever in 2012, and their decommissioning was announced in 2013.
In 2018 and 2019, hundreds of people were killed in what one can argue was a spectacular regulatory fail — the quintessential fox guarding the henhouse. Boeing’s then new 737 MAX 8 jets had recently rolled off assembly lines, ostensibly without major changes to software that had been used in earlier versions of the jet. One crashed shortly after takeoff in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Several months later, another crashed shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. The MAX 8 was grounded in the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Ethiopia — but the U.S. Federal Aviation Commission refused to ground the plane here. Angry airline passengers flooded social media telling Boeing and regulators that “blood is on your hands,” but the FAA didn’t ground the planes for several more days. Turns out the accidents sprang from a flawed automated flight-control system that Boeing failed to adequately disclose to pilots and regulators.
In early 2021, anchors from large container ships hooked an underwater oil pipeline on the ocean floor some five miles off Huntington Beach’s coast, bending it like a straw. About nine months later, the weakened pipeline ruptured, releasing 25,000 gallons of crude oil that killed marine life, damaged wetlands, closed beaches and battered area businesses. The minimum distance between a commercial ship’s anchor and any oil pipeline in the area was just 500 feet; after studying the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board said it should be three times greater, at 1,500 feet. Underwater alarm systems on oil pipelines should more quickly alert officials when ships drop anchor nearby, and oil companies should follow protocols for training and employee drug testing after accidents, it concluded.
All of that had been true for decades — when the oil companies that owned those systems were in charge of filing their own inspection reports and making their own safety recommendations.
And for nearly a decade, we’ve been chronicling horrors in California’s absurdly under-regulated, private-pay addiction treatment system. Fraud, abuse and death happen at a frequency and scale that should shock the conscience and rattle the soul. There was outrage in the wake of our reporting: Many shiny new laws were passed. More licensing analysts were hired. But even scores of inspectors are no match for the nearly 2,000 addiction treatment facilities in California, which might only be inspected every other year.
To make matters worse, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required outpatient treatment facilities — where the bulk of treatment happens in California — to be licensed by the state. Other states license these facilities because they provide health care.
“They’re taking human beings and treating them as if they’re a commodity, as if they were oil or pork, and then selling them from one rehab center to another rehab center with no interest in actually helping them out,” an outraged investigator for the state Insurance Department said last year. “It’s a massive industry about money…. There is nearly zero regulation on what’s happening.” And it’s as bad out there now as it ever was — maybe worse, he said.
Heck, you see the results of poor government oversight in your monthly electric bill. Even the state auditor said that the California Public Utilities Commission is a weak watchdog that doesn’t bite and allows the big investor-owned utilities to reap some of the largest profits in the nation.
Look, we don’t feel entirely comfortable arguing for more regulation. We’re not a nanny-state enthusiast. But we were children once, and we have children, and we know kids must be watched rather closely to ensure they do the right thing. We don’t believe adults are all that different.
Government can do good. And smart and effective regulation can prevent the disasters that police and firefighters clean up later.
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