Offshore Gulf of Mexico near-miss incidents post-2000

Paired with Macondo. Tom invokes these as the rationale for the National Academy bolted-connections study.

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.