BP Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer failure

Used as the contemporary example of what TWI's oil-company clients are paying to prevent. Cost BP 25% of net assets. Tom was hired on the matter through a 1/3-liability party; BP indemnified, work never executed.

After World War II there were three places that decided they needed to study brittle fracture of steel. One was — there was a guy, Richard Weck, who later became Sir Richard Weck. He was a postdoc at the University of Cambridge. He was pedaling his bicycle around Abingdon in the countryside, and he decided this was where he wanted the British government to build him a welding institute to study welding and fracture. And they did. Today the Welding Institute in Britain is one of the premier institutes for studying fracture mechanics, particularly welded structures. They get most of their money out of oil companies who have billion-dollar rigs and don't want them to break. Because if they do, look what happened to BP — cost them 25% of their net assets. They're not the company they once were, because of a major failure.