Deepwater Horizon / BP Macondo well blowout

Tom's National Academy committee on undersea bolted connections. He notes "about four near-miss Macondo failures in addition to Macondo in the last 15 or 20 years."

If you've heard of the Royal Society in Britain, well, the National Academy is the U.S. equivalent of the Royal Society — advisors to the government. Their building is right across from the Lincoln Memorial on the mall in Washington DC. They are not a government agency, but they're quasi-governmental in the sense that there's very little money they can take from anything except the government to do paper studies. They do the paper studies through the National Research Council. They will put together a team. I worked on a team most recently for the Department of the Interior, and it had to do with bolts, bolted connections in undersea oil production. They didn't want another Macondo failure. Did you know we've had about four near-miss Macondo failures in addition to Macondo in the last 15 or 20 years? It's all public knowledge, but most people don't know that. The Department of the Interior knows it because they're responsible for it. So they put a bunch of people on the committee to try to figure out what they should do to make sure we don't have another failure like that.

Used as a contemporary example of the National Academy commissioning a Gulf Marine committee post-disaster. Not developed as a case in this lecture.

Out of about 36 people on this study, I was the only one — I'll talk about how I got there. The National Academy of Sciences was chartered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. They are not a government entity, but their building is right there across from the Lincoln Memorial right on the Mall. Congress will often commission them to do a study. For the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, they've now formed a new Gulf Marine committee to look at the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and all the things that come out of that, because of how big that was.

Contrast case to Tom's earlier BOP investigations — property damage vs. fatalities, civil vs. regulatory enforcement, and Congressional attention.

The BP oil spill — they're all over that. But there have been plenty of BOPs — blowout preventers — that have failed. They fail all the time. I had three fail in Louisiana about a year and a half before the one in the Gulf, something I looked at. I looked into the design by the manufacturer, and it all came up empirically. In the oil industry, you have to start as a roughneck. I don't care if you've got a college degree, you've got to start as a roughneck if you're going to rise to top management. That's the culture in the oil industry. There's an attitude of good old boys — we're going to do it the way we've always done it. Not a lot of good science behind it.