Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

On 12/27/2010 03:04 PM, Ignoramus7943 wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how ineffective
all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the Diesel
operators, who should have known what was going on, but failed to shut
them down until they exploded. The overspeeding Diesel generators may
have olver-volted critical electrical equipment and caused some other
safety gear to fail to function. Of course, if they didn't have a
compression release on those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there
would have been no way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is
ineffective if the intake air is combustible. You'd think, however,
that a drilling platform would be designed with this possibility in mind.

Thanks for the link!

Jon

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

Jon Elson wrote:

On 12/27/2010 03:04 PM, Ignoramus7943 wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how ineffective
all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the Diesel
operators, who should have known what was going on, but failed to shut
them down until they exploded. The overspeeding Diesel generators may
have olver-volted critical electrical equipment and caused some other
safety gear to fail to function. Of course, if they didn't have a
compression release on those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there
would have been no way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is
ineffective if the intake air is combustible. You'd think, however,
that a drilling platform would be designed with this possibility in mind.

I've heard that diesels can actually suck lube oil up from the crankcase
and run away, but that'd come from worn seals or piston rings.

Thanks,
Rich

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

On 2010-12-30, Jon Elson wrote:
On 12/27/2010 03:04 PM, Ignoramus7943 wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how ineffective
all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the Diesel
operators, who should have known what was going on, but failed to shut
them down until they exploded. The overspeeding Diesel generators may
have olver-volted critical electrical equipment and caused some other
safety gear to fail to function. Of course, if they didn't have a
compression release on those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there
would have been no way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is
ineffective if the intake air is combustible. You'd think, however,
that a drilling platform would be designed with this possibility in mind.

Thanks for the link!

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

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

"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

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

Rich Grise writes:


I've heard that diesels can actually suck lube oil up from the crankcase
and run away, but that'd come from worn seals or piston rings.

Maybe..
Some Rabbits would suck crankcase oil via the air filter, not just running
away but also burning HOT and melting the glowplugs. Not Fun.

There was a recall.

--
A host is a host from coast to
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

John R. Carroll wrote:
Jon Elson wrote:

On 12/27/2010 03:04 PM, Ignoramus7943 wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/us...pagewanted=all

Wow, that was quite good! it was pretty amazing to see how
ineffective all the people who SHOULD have responded were. Expecially the
Diesel operators, who should have known what was going
on, but failed to shut them down until they exploded. The
overspeeding Diesel generators may have olver-volted critical
electrical equipment and caused some other safety gear to fail to
function. Of course, if they didn't have a compression release on
those engines, or a very tight air cutoff, there would have been no
way to shut them down. Cutting off fuel is ineffective if the intake
air is combustible. You'd think, however, that a drilling platform
would be designed with this possibility in mind.


It was.
A careful reading of the article discloses that all of the automated
response systems had been specifically disabled.
This wasn't anything nefarious and was done with deliberation.


But, as far as I could tell, at least TWO operators were standing right
AT the control
panel, and apparently did nothing as the engines started wailing like
banshees! That
seems pretty amazing, as the article seems to state they knew a blowout
was in progress
and they could see the gas alarm panel indicating massive amounts of
methane all
over the platform. So, I'm not talking about an automatic system, but a
manual intervention.
Disabling automatic systems assumes that personnel will be able to react
to an emergency.

Jon

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

Steve B wrote:
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.

Well, maybe. It wasn't just paralysis at the moment of crisis, there
was stuff done wrong
starting, probably, before the well drilling was begun. I think there
were 5 things (or more)
wrong with the blowout preventer. At least 4 of those were known to BP
and Transocean
at the time. the BOP was 10 years old, and overdue for a major
inspection. There was apparently
another drill pipe left over from when the got a stock pipe several
months before the accident
that was passing through the BOP, and they had no idea it was in there.
This may be why
the shear ram couldn't cut the drill pipe. Of course, it is well-known
that the testing of the
final cement job was VERY poorly done, and a RAFT of abnormal
indications were pretty
much ignored. So, the BOP may have worked if activated early enough,
and it may not have
worked due to the multiple problems in the BOP and the extra drill pipe.

This was such a HUGE blowout, however, that there may have been no
stopping it, once it
got started with only seawater in the casing.

Jon

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

I've heard that diesels can actually suck lube oil up from the crankcase
and run away, but that'd come from worn seals or piston rings.

Thanks,
Rich

Many diesels are turbocharged. If those seals fail, the engine ingests
it's own lube oil and revs itself to destruction.
It sounds like these diesels were running on the well gas. The normal
engine governers would have shut off the fuel as soon as the speed
increased. There are only two ways to stop this overspeed. 1) increase
the mechainical load on the engine. This can be done in a car but not
on a generator like these. 2) shut the air intake to the engine.
That's also just about impossible on engines as big as these unless
there's a system in place to do it.

John

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

"Jon Elson" wrote

I think there
were 5 things (or more)
wrong with the blowout preventer.

There were enough things wrong with enough things that they should have shut
down operations until everything had been corrected. But, as John Carroll
said, the math would not let them do that. So what happened happened.

Steve

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

John wrote:
Many diesels are turbocharged. If those seals fail, the engine ingests
it's own lube oil and revs itself to destruction.
It sounds like these diesels were running on the well gas. The normal
engine governers would have shut off the fuel as soon as the speed
increased. There are only two ways to stop this overspeed. 1) increase
the mechainical load on the engine. This can be done in a car but not
on a generator like these. 2) shut the air intake to the engine.
That's also just about impossible on engines as big as these unless
there's a system in place to do it.

Many Diesels have one extra, last-chance emergency shutdown method, which is
a system that locks open a valve in each cylinder. On Detroit Diesel
engines
so equipped, there is a linkage on the valve cover that swings
spring-loaded catches
against the valve spring retainers. As each valve is opened, the catch
clicks into
place, holding the valve open. I have seen a similar mechanism on some
other
make of Diesel engines.

Jon

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

John R. Carroll wrote:
(...)

Death benefit payments for 50
families are a trivial matter when the cost of operating a rig in $250K per
day and replacing it is a billion dollars or more.

That is some whopping benefit though. (...) "funeral expenses and a
portion of the workers' lost wages."

--Winston

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
John wrote:
Many diesels are turbocharged. If those seals fail, the engine ingests
it's own lube oil and revs itself to destruction.
It sounds like these diesels were running on the well gas. The normal
engine governers would have shut off the fuel as soon as the speed
increased. There are only two ways to stop this overspeed. 1) increase
the mechainical load on the engine. This can be done in a car but not
on a generator like these. 2) shut the air intake to the engine.
That's also just about impossible on engines as big as these unless
there's a system in place to do it.

Many Diesels have one extra, last-chance emergency shutdown method, which
is
a system that locks open a valve in each cylinder. On Detroit Diesel
engines
so equipped, there is a linkage on the valve cover that swings
spring-loaded catches
against the valve spring retainers. As each valve is opened, the catch
clicks into
place, holding the valve open. I have seen a similar mechanism on some
other
make of Diesel engines.

Jon

I would ass-u-me that anything that large would have a fail-safe mechanical
system of that sort.

Steve

Deepwater horizon explosion -- in depth article
 

"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
John wrote:
Many diesels are turbocharged. If those seals fail, the engine ingests
it's own lube oil and revs itself to destruction.
It sounds like these diesels were running on the well gas. The normal
engine governers would have shut off the fuel as soon as the speed
increased. There are only two ways to stop this overspeed. 1) increase
the mechainical load on the engine. This can be done in a car but not
on a generator like these. 2) shut the air intake to the engine.
That's also just about impossible on engines as big as these unless
there's a system in place to do it.

Many Diesels have one extra, last-chance emergency shutdown method, which
is
a system that locks open a valve in each cylinder. On Detroit Diesel
engines
so equipped, there is a linkage on the valve cover that swings
spring-loaded catches
against the valve spring retainers. As each valve is opened, the catch
clicks into
place, holding the valve open. I have seen a similar mechanism on some
other
make of Diesel engines.

Jon

When I worked in the oil patch,(about 40 years ago) all the diesels had a
set of butterfly valves on the air intake. I think they were actuated when
the blow out preventer was activated. It stopped them cold!