Contents
Winter/Spring 2011 • No. 177
features cont. 30 Instilling a Stronger Safety
Culture: What Are the Incentives? The Deepwater Horizon spill focused scrutiny on industry incentives to reduce the risk of an oil spill. But are current incentives adequate to push industry to prevent, contain, and clean up spills—and more broadly, to push firms to adopt a strong safety culture?
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38 Managing Environmental,
Health, and Safety Risks: A Closer Look at How Three Federal Agencies Respond
Joshua Linn and Nathan Richardson
34 Managing the Risks of Deepwater Drilling
This article takes a retrospective look at how the Minerals Management Service (MMS, now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE) compares with two other federal agencies that are charged with responding to major accidents.
Catastrophic spills, while of very low probability, are responsible for the vast majority of damage from oil spills. Without analysis of their likelihood and the damage they may cause, there is no way to know if enough is being done to reduce this threat. Carolyn Kousky
Lynn Scarlett, Arthur Fraas, Richard Morgenstern, and Timothy Murphy
37 Preventing Offshore Oil Spills
44 The Next Battle: Containing
No amount of planning, training, incentivizing, or institution building can substitute for this fundamental recognition: problems will arise. We must spot them when they occur and prevent them from occurring again.
Future Major Oil Spills
The failures leading to the spill were matched by subsequent failure to contain it: from junk shots to top kills, nearly three months passed before the oil was finally stopped. Much more needs to be done in terms of government policy and industry commitments before the next spill.
Roger Cooke, Heather Ross, and Adam Stern
Mark A. Cohen, Molly K. Macauley, and Nathan Richardson
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