Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent covering energy and antitrust at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.
The near-miss raises questions of corporate management in a battered oil industry, how drillers will handle increasingly volatile hurricanes, and federal oversight of the offshore drilling industry nearly 11 years after the Gulf of Mexico was coated in oil.
Newly surfaced public records reveal that state regulators complained last year that federal authorities had failed to adequately investigate the reports of Falcon pipeline defects.
