{"id":10096,"date":"2026-05-28T14:02:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=10096"},"modified":"2026-05-28T14:02:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:02:24","slug":"weak-government-regulation-often-leads-to-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=10096","title":{"rendered":"Weak government regulation often leads to disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019ll never look at an airplane window quite the same way again.<\/p>\n

Read more Life of a ballot: How Orange County\u2019s votes are counted, verified and stored<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s good, but there are doubters. Is the threat really gone?<\/p>\n

We had hoped to come to you today with more answers to the questions plaguing us \u2014 who made that tank? why did its cooling system stop working? why didn\u2019t GKN have a dependable backup for that system? etc.<\/p>\n

But that will take more time.<\/p>\n

Until then, can we simply agree that government\u2019s most important job is to keep people safe? For so long, to so many, official protection\u00a0has meant well-staffed police and fire departments \u2014 but never, ever, more inspectors with clipboards. Over-regulation strangles the economy! The free market does the job far more efficiently than government intervention!<\/p>\n

Really?<\/p>\n

Disasters often seem to spring from the lack of outside eyeballs, weak enforcement of rules, and businesses left to essentially regulate themselves.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

More than 126,000 of those companies have had violations, according to CalEPA data. Much as GKN had.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s blessing.<\/p>\n

So you wonder: Is there more that government can and should be doing on the oversight and enforcement side of things?<\/p>\n

Might some investment in oversight reduce the need for terrifying emergency operations like the one we\u2019ve all just endured (under an intense international spotlight) for the past week?<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Let\u2019s revisit a series of high-profile failures \u2014 some involving money, some involving lives, some involving both \u2014 over our not-so-distant past.<\/p>\n

Anybody watching?<\/h4>\n

We\u2019ll start with Orange County\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s Great Recession of 2008? \u201cThe 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\u2019s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down,\u201d the New York Times reported in September of that year.<\/p>\n

Read more Justice Department opens investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of assault: AP source<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIt\u2019s like taking a Model T and slapping a V-8 engine in it,\u201d a critic said at the time. \u201cSouthern California Edison didn\u2019t want to admit they were dramatically different, because that would open up a license amendment, and the public would get involved.\u201d San Onofre\u2019s reactors powered off forever in 2012, and their decommissioning was announced in 2013.<\/p>\n

In 2018 and 2019, hundreds of people were killed in what one can argue was a spectacular regulatory fail \u2014 the quintessential fox guarding the henhouse. Boeing\u2019s 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 \u2014 but the U.S. Federal Aviation Commission refused to ground the plane here. Angry airline passengers flooded social media telling Boeing and regulators that \u201cblood is on your hands,\u201d but the FAA didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

In early 2021, anchors from large container ships hooked an underwater oil pipeline on the ocean floor some five miles off Huntington Beach\u2019s 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\u2019s anchor and any oil pipeline in the area was just 500 feet; after studying the accident, the \u00a0National 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.<\/p>\n

All of that had been true for decades \u2014 when the oil companies that owned those systems were in charge of filing their own inspection reports and making their own safety recommendations.<\/p>\n

And for nearly a decade, we\u2019ve been chronicling horrors in California\u2019s 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:\u00a0Many 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.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required outpatient treatment facilities \u2014 where the bulk of treatment happens in California \u2014 to be licensed<\/em> by the state. Other states license these facilities because they provide health care<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re taking human beings and treating them as if they\u2019re 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,\u201d an outraged investigator for the state Insurance Department said last year. \u201cIt\u2019s a massive industry about money\u2026. There is nearly zero regulation on what\u2019s happening.\u201d And it\u2019s as bad out there now as it ever was \u2014 maybe worse, he said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t bite and allows the big investor-owned utilities to reap some of the largest profits in the nation.<\/p>\n

Look, we don\u2019t feel entirely comfortable arguing for more regulation. We\u2019re 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\u2019t believe adults are all that different.<\/p>\n

Government can do good. And smart and effective regulation can prevent the disasters that police and firefighters clean up later.<\/p>\n

Read more At Rady Children\u2019s in Orange, Disney characters in MRI rooms aim to ease scan anxiety<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columnist Teri Sforza writes: Disasters often seem to spring from the lack of outside eyeballs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10095,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion-columnist","category-represents-the-opinion-of-the-author-who-is-either-a-paid-columnist-or-an-unpaid-guest-columnist"],"yoast_head":"\nWeak government regulation often leads to disaster - Silicon Valley Moving Post<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=10096\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Weak government regulation often leads to disaster - 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