"Ignoramus7319" wrote


Yes, my mind boggles to think that an alarm was not sounded for a long
time, just because the girl operator was mentally paralyzed and did
not do her job.

The diesel controls, too, clearly were not properly designed to stop
them when overspeeding.

Generally, the platform does not seem to be well designed.

i

Thousands of rigs have punched thousands of wells before this one, and with
far more primitive equipment. This is a comedy of errors. The design is
not the question, the management override of the hands on men is.

What comes through to me is that the management of the platform was
basically taken out of the hands of the men who had eyes on hands on ability
to activate safety equipment at an early stage, the general approach being
that anything that refined should not be left on the hands of a mere
employee who is a only a technically skilled laborer.

And still, when the **** starts to fly, each man has to know his duties and
responsibilities, and go do them. Here, there was a cluster jerk, each man
running into the next who was only more confused as to what to do than he
was, because the safety device they were supposed to deploy took a lot of
time to get authorized, or it took approval of another level of management.

Replay the scenario, and the rig should have ideally shut in the well,
sheared off it, and floated away. What kept it in place and caused it to
blow up was redundancy of engineering that kept decisions from being made.

The motormen on a drilling rig, the ones who operated the EMD's had one of
the toughest, easiest jobs on a rig. They were inside, warm all the time,
with humming EMD's, clean well lit surroundings, and knew every sound and
nuance of what was going on. The fact that the EMDs COULD be let run to a
point of overspeeding speaks of someone defeating a safety limit for some
other reason. Almost every motor package I entered on my years on platforms
were clean enough that you almost had to take off your shoes to come in.

The hands not being on the floor to throw the first line of defense in the
shut down process is inexcusable. One time, I saw a well kicking, just the
exact same thing that happened here. I was sitting on my crane, and I saw
drilling mud spurting three to four stories out of the mud separators. The
hands and driller were all on the floor at a non-drilling stage, and sitting
around the floor, smoking, sleeping, and not paying attention. I got on the
crane whistle and held it open until the tool pusher came out to see what
was happening, and I just pointed to the four story mud spurts. Boy, did
that driller and those hands get a reaming! With their smoking on the
floor, we could have gone up in one big Roman Candle like BP did.

Bottom line, your weakest link is your fail point, and when the engineering,
or management department take away the decision making process from these
lowly types because they deem them too uneducated to make these decisions,
the dominoes will continue to fall.

I have reserved any judgement or opinion on this incident until these final
facts have come out. Having speng years on offshore drilling rigs, I can
clearly see that this is a management failure, and that failure is to let
men whose own lives are at risk control the safety devices. Had they been
allowed to activate these, the well would have been shut in, and we would
have never heard about BP.

Steve