I am very sorry for your loss. Nadim was my friend also.
I believe that there were mistakes made in one way or another during that storm, but you will have to ask Geokinetics to explain that to you. They are responsible for providing you answers and for helping to take care of you.

I resigned from Geokinetics 16 months ago and no longer work in the Gulf of Mexico.

Best of luck, Sultana

Or maybe next year you can engineer a regulation that all doctors wear a fresh pair of gloves when touching any patient. That will only add a dollar or two to the cost of each health care visit and I am sure that somewhere, sometime that will prevent an infection as well. The only difference between the two measures is the magnitude of the cost per benefit. And since some doctors will be seeing some patients in ten years, you can crow about how the troglodyte doctors resisted the march of public health progress but civilization didnt collapse.

Pardon my hyperbole, but the tone and gratuitous one-sidedness of this column was unworthy of you. Please respond.

And hardly ever –EVER –is someone held accountable for demonstrating the benefit. So please spare us your scorn for the dentists’ resistance to one more example of this unless you can also show us the stats on infections prevented. And then maybe we’ll find your scorn persuasive.

The key word here is “unions.” Nothing less than a fully protected right of workers to organize, unionize, and obtain collective bargaining rights with the full protection of the law, will do. Otherwise we are going to lurch from one band-aid to the next, from the overt tragedy of blood-splattered wreckage to the covert tragedy of occupational diseases that kill their victims in their own homes.

Further there needs to be strict criminal liability up and down the chain, corporate veil be damned. In the present case we have a building collapse. Have you ever seen videos of concrete construction practices in some parts of the world? It’s nothing less than proof of the existence of God, that those buildings stand up at all (pardon my crappy attempt at irony). Get a friend who’s in civil engineering to keyword search YouTube, and you will find enough to make him or her sick to the stomach to watch:

Concrete mixed with so much water it runs like lentil soup, placed into leaky forms with shoddy or no reinforcing, not consolidated properly, and then allowed to “dry” rather than being properly cured. And last but not least, “Upward ever upward!, and faster ever faster!” is the cry of the day, as one floor is built upon the next without even allowing the proper time for the concrete to attain anything near the necessary strength. Even in places where you see brand new “high tech” equipment in use, these practices continue, and the buildings fall over at the slightest nudge.

Licensing of contractors _and_ materials producers is necessary, and strict process-based building codes are necessary until the point is reached where the building codes can switch over to being result-based. Process-based building codes dictate exactly how the work should be done. Result-based codes dictate the outcomes. If the local contractors are so bloody corrupt that they can’t work to a standard, someone has to stand over them with a pair of handcuffs and ensure they perform the process correctly.

All of this can be backed with global agreements, though it is going to be necessary to pry the cold dead hand of capital off the levers of power to get there. Between now and then, we should all be conscientiously refusing to buy any products whatsoever that are made in the countries that are the worst offenders. We can live without baubles and bling. Better that than to live with blood on our hands.