Former Navy secretary heads science groups' spill inquiry

Nick Snow
OGJ Washington Editor

WASHINGTON, DC, July 13 -- Former US Navy Sec. Donald C. Winter will chair a committee analyzing technical questions about what caused the Deepwater Horizon crude oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and National Research Council (NRC) jointly announced on July 12. He and other members of the committee will attend US Coast Guard and US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOE) hearings July 19-23 in Kenner, La., and visit the Apr. 20 well blowout and rig accident’s site, the two science groups said.

The US Department of the Interior asked the two National Academies of Sciences organizations in June to perform the analysis alongside a joint USCG-BOE inquiry and US President Barack Obama’s independent commission’s investigation of the accident and spill’s causes and implications for US Outer Continental Shelf resource management.

Winter is a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan, a retired top executive of Northrop Grumman Corp., and an NAE member. Eight other committee members have been chosen and more will be named before the group holds its first meeting in late July or early August, NAE and NRC said in their joint announcement.

They said the committee also will hold public hearings on the Gulf Coast and plans to issue an interim report with preliminary findings and recommendations by Oct. 31. Its final report will be released in 2011.

NAE and NRC said the committee’s work will be assisted by NRC’s Transportation Research Board, Engineering and Physical Sciences Division, and Earth and Life Studies Division.

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