Robert Bea has an unusual specialty: He studies disasters. As one of the world’s leading experts in catastrophic risk management, the former Shell Oil Co. executive sifts through the wreckage to unravel the chain of events that triggers accidents. The blunt-spoken civil engineer has spent more than a half-century investigating high-profile engineering failures, from the space shuttle Columbia’s horrific end to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig in the Gulf.
A professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Bea’s disaster autopsy methods — such as looking at the organizational breakdowns that lead to calamities — have been widely adopted. Although policymakers and corporate honchos seek his counsel, sometimes they don’t like what he has to say — witness the flak he took from BP during the Deepwater Horizon probe.
Now in his mid-70s, Bea’s voice is raspier, but his critical faculties are undimmed. On a crisp fall day, he talked with DISCOVER in his comfortable one-story house in Moraga, a leafy suburb east of Berkeley, about what causes catastrophes.
You have said that engineering failures aren’t the chief culprits behind disasters, pointing instead to human and organizational failures — inadequate safety protocols, corporate hierarchies, conflicting egos or just plain laziness. Was there an “aha moment” when this became apparent?
When I was involved in the investigation into the Piper Alpha disaster, when an explosion destroyed an Occidental Petroleum oil-drilling platform in the North Sea, killing 167 men in 1988. The external investigation team that had been hired by Occidental into what caused Piper Alpha found it was a corporate culture that had gone bad, had lost its way.
