Ethical Dilemmas In The Engineering Industry

Engineers have been responsible for almost every single advancement in our modern world. An engineers’ duty is to protect and serve for the greater good of society. In every single project, an engineer must ensure the health and welfare of the public is the highest priority. Engineers must treat their profession as though it is a privilege and not a right. As engineering has progressed, sets of rules and ethical standards also developed. These guidelines of sorts are meant to be followed stringently and respected internationally. Throughout the progression in our modern society, the need for power has become ever so present. Ethical rules and codices have fallen short in regards to this. They have evolved to keep up with the latest safety standards …show more content…
The oil spill was a result of natural gas surging from the well under the sea floor. The gas blasted off the protective cap that was meant to seal the well. The gas then later travelled to the surface where it ignited and cause the entire floating oil rig to combust and sink. The blowout caused two hundred million gallons of crude oil to spill into the ocean. The oil escaped the well at a rate of sixty thousand barrels per day until it was finally capped. This type of incident was not the first that British Petroleum (BP), the owners of the rig, had experienced. Years prior on another oil rig, an identical problem had occurred. A design flaw in the capping mechanism was to blame for the failure of both wells. The caps were discovered in many other cases to be too weak to withstand the conditions of the deep ocean, and as a result they failed frequently. The people in charge of these types of operations for the major oil companies were all experienced, vetted and competent individuals who should have known better than to approve the well designs. The problem stemmed from the top of the chain of command. Superiors demanded that the well be completed in 51 days instead of the intended 78. The wells’ drilling progress was accelerated and red flags, which BP considered normal, began to come up left and right. BP’s …show more content…
Anatoly Dyatlov, the chief engineer in charge at the time of the disaster, is the man to blame for the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. At the power plant a test was being conducted to determine how effectively the reactor core could be cooled down in emergency situations. During the test several things began to go wrong. The reactors’ power level dropped far too low for the test to be safely conducted. The team members were forced to obey the man in charge, Dyatlov, and continue with the test. Not long after the coolant flow was cut off to the reactor, more problems began to occur. The power levels of the reactor were rising, to counteract these problems the team initiated an emergency shutdown process which would bring the power level down. This however did the exact opposite. It created a power surge and as a result the reactors vessel exploded and sent the radioactive fuel shooting up into the surrounding environment. After investigations into the accident, it was determined that the reactors design was flawed from the start and the engineers who were responsible for its construction knew about these flaws, yet they remained silent. The reactor was designed to be very unstable at low power levels and its shutdown process was not even remotely feasible. It was also determined that the team in charge of the reactor that day did not follow protocol and stop the test after noticing problems. The engineers in