Clay Maitland

On a quest for quality in shipping

The ISM code comes into its own

The many victims of maritime paperwork fatigue may, in the wake of Deepwater Horizon, soon have even more to bewail. Continue reading

Planning for next time: Matching resources with reality

Nostalgia, as the saying goes, isn’t what it used to be. Reminiscence is kinder; when we look back, in the mellow afterglow of selective memory, it often seems that everything either went according to plan or, at any rate, went just as we said it would. Hindsight is more rigourous. It means examining, understanding and learning from experience. Continue reading

Getting serious about risk management?

The Gulf of Mexico postmortems are landing with explosive force, even if the well has not yet been sealed. At what Churchill liked to call the root of the matter, there wasan inability to appreciate and apply a safety or risk management system to the drilling and operation of at least some exploratory and production wells on the U. S. outer continental shelf. Continue reading

Quote and unquote

When Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is quoted – again and again – for having said “never allow a good crisis to go to waste”, we’re driven to grub through memory’s attic for other appropriate one-liners, adaptable for oil spill bloggery. Continue reading