Halliburton Worker on Smoke Break Missed BP Well Data
A Halliburton Co. technician missed key signals that BP Plc’s doomed Macondo well was on the verge of blowing out because he was taking a smoking break, a federal investigative panel heard.
We’ve long known that the three underlying causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster were Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris. Now you can add smoking to the list of causes. Bloomberg has the sad story:
Joseph E. Keith, a senior unit manager for Halliburton’s Sperry subsidiary, told the U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department panel in Houston today that he left his post aboard the Deepwater Horizon for about 10 minutes on the night of the April disaster to drink coffee and smoke half a cigarette.
While he was away from his monitors, pressure data indicated the well was filling up with explosive natural gas and crude, according to charts entered into evidence today by the panel in Houston. Keith said that had he seen the pressure data, he would have “called the rig floor” to warn fellow workers they were in danger.
The April 20 catastrophe killed 11 employees, injured 17, sank the $365 million Transocean Ltd. vessel and triggered the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Millions of barrels of crude gushed into the ocean for almost three months, fouling beaches, fishing grounds and marshes, and bringing deep-water oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico to a halt.
“Without someone watching those crucial data points, the people working on the rig had no way of knowing something was awry,” Robert L. Cavnar, former chief financial officer for El Paso Corp.’s oil-drilling business and author of “Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout.”
They say success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan. But, in fact, the bigger the screwup, the more people who must have contributed, global warming being the ultimate example.
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They found their fall guy.
More criticaaly IMHO, apparently the system is set up with no double checks. It would have been just as bad had it been a bathroom break, sudden illness, etc., or even just distraction as a consequence of boredom. I have to say the smoking thing sounds like a… smokescreen.
Steve, exactly. No system as crucial as this should be left to the vagaries of tummy upsets.
Ironically, he was probably following the rules. I’ll bet they permit smoke breaks, but forbid smoking inside workrooms.
Any major and hazardous engineering project has both a safety factor and redundancy. Norwegian offshore rigs do, including containment vessels and predrilled relief wells. Only on an American/BP $365 million project with potentially catastrophic consequences did they decide to forget about both. That gives you an idea of how much they respect their workers’ lives and the many people and animals who live in the Gulf.
Those pressure logs were also real-time linked to BPs office in Houston. Of course, at 10pm Central time, everybody was probably home watching the Daily Show.
The window between “Nominal” and “kabooom” was 10 minutes? Are you kidding me? No way a 1 mile length of drilling pipe can fill with explosive gas in 10 minutes! If it was that critical there should have been automated backup monitoring and evacuation alarms going off all over the place. Nuts!
If there was a display that showed a build up that was critical for the manger to warn other of danger, had he been present, why wasn’t there a remote system to raise such a warning?
Julian Assange reportedly has threatened to release some sort of ‘doomsday’ file of information — which includes revelations about BP — in the event of his arrest, death or shutdown of Wikileaks. Have not heard if the information is related to the spill.
Yeah, and the Valdez was caused by an imbibing pilot. Wow. The reinstitutionalization of scape goatery. Amazing, the consequences of human desires to bend reality — and I don’t mean by using substances.
The real-time Halliburton logs show that the well started flowing at 8:10pm on 20 Apr. This was evidence that something was very wrong — as the well was supposedly cased and cemented and therefore could not flow. Eight minutes later there was gas in the mud; at 9:08 the log shows that the driller knew he had a problem and reacted by stopping circulation. At 9:10 they pumped down mud pit to dispose of the excess volume of mud coming back up the wellbore. At 9:30pm, there may have been an attempt to shut the BOPs. At 9:47, there was a big pressure surge; at 9:49 the log ended. Catastrophically. So the ’10 minute window’ idea is nonsense.
As is the revisionist history that Exxon Valdez wasn’t being driven by a drunk.