TVA Chief’s management style – “hands-off"?
April 14, 2010
From Associated Press reports:
“Kilgore’s affidavit, filed electronically Sunday in Knoxville, says he “never had any hands-on involvement” in personnel decisions about who inspected the Kingston ash facilities. Kilgore said he could not recall discussing or deciding any capital improvement item for the dike.”
“Plaintiff attorney Elizabeth Alexander of Nashville said Tuesday that a response will be filed and "we are going to continue to seek his deposition."”
Within TVA’s “silos” of security, each silo protecting its own turf it is no wonder Kilgore could have been left out of the loop.
But it was Kilgore’s responsibility to assure himself and the rest of the TVA organization that proper management controls were in place so that the “red flags” so prominent in this case would have been recognized by management.
There is something else going on within the TVA culture and that is a bonus driven system that demands maximum production at minimum cost. It would be easy enough for a manager to postpone or delay reporting what obviously was a possible serious breach in the dam. I have evidence from others that this has happened numerous times regarding other safety related items.
But this time there was no “boy at the dike” to stop the leaks; if reported to higher management the Kingston “dike” might never have happened. A plant operator once told me that he wondered himself how much higher the ash dam could go without collapsing of its own weight.
Of course, we still do not know if the technical reports of the impending dam break reached any higher than that particular silo’s management.
And, of course, whose responsibility was it to know what was going on all that time? Was it incompetent workers who failed to realize the danger? (Remember the little flame that almost caused a nuclear reactor to meltdown?) Was it silo management who did not want to spend the extra cash to repair the dam to maintain bonuses?
The boy’s finger in the dike points directly to the one responsible for every piece of coal used in TVA’s electricity production to preparing reports to the SEC and Congress – CEO Tom Kilgore.
But it looks like Kilgore is further isolating himself from what is going on with his new layer upon layer of new executive and managerial staff. It is huge.
Ostensibly, it was the Kingston disaster that called for this latest reorganization but it appears that more layers of management will only exacerbate the problem.
Stay tuned…
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
http://norsworthyopinion.com