Gulf Oil Spill Feared as Rig Workers Still Missing

I have some inside knowledge on this. I know people who are involved.

The Blow Out Preventer (BOP) on the sea bed manufactured by Cameron failed to close when an overpressure condition was sensed at this time it is unclear why but there are some things that may have played into that. A crew from Halliburton was on board in the process of cementing casing. They experienced a loss of circulation (meaning more cement was going down than brine was coming back up.) which indicates they probably were losing it to a gas pocket, which is compressible whereas brine is not. Compressible gasses in such a situation are bad news as they can store horrendous amounts of energy. When that energy is released you get what is known as a "kick" or pressure spike. There are two kinds of hydraulically operated (usually, although all electric wellheads are becoming in vogue these days) rams in a BOP. A pipe ram and a blind/shear ram. The pipe ram clamps around the production tubing/drill pipe and seals the annular area between the tubing and the casing (generally just called the annulus), the other type is part guillotine, part gate valve. It shears off the pipe, folds it over , and completely seals off the wellhead. the BOP should have activated automatically when the pressure spike occurred, but it did not, it should also have automatically activated when the "riser", a 22" I.D. pipe running from the drill floor to the subsea wellhead, broke away from the wellhead when the ship sank. The ship was a Dynamic Positioning vessel that uses thrusters, active ballast systems, and sophisticated GPS and subsea acoustic beacons to maintain position, when the fire broke out and the vessel lost power, the only thing holding it on station was the riser. I have come to learn that BP, which likes to give a lot of lip service to safety, violated a huge safety no-no (as BP is wont to do. They are very difficult to work for due to their safety demands on vendors and contractors, but they themselves violate safety procedures with abandon.). They apparently require a software lockout on the blind-shear rams during drilling on all their offshore vessels. There is one manual override for the software lockout. it is the drillers station which is on the drill floor. But in this situation if an explosion and fire has occurred, even if there was someone AT the driller's station, they'd be roasted alive. This could be the reason why the BOP failed to close.

An ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) has been able to stab into the BOP but they cannot close the rams. Luckily the wellhead would appear to have stopped flowing, Probably the riser and the production tubing have folded over and pinched themselves closed. That combined with the hydrostatic pressure at depth has prevented any further leakage, but this cannot be a stable situation. HOPEFULLY it will hold long enough to allow crews to drill a horizontal well to intersect this well and be able to pump cement into the well to plug it. The slick that is visible now I am told is coming from the sunken rig itself, it had over 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board used both as fuel and as ballast.

There are 9 Transocean crew members and two MI-Swaco crewmembers unaccounted for and the search has been called off at this point because no human could have survived immersed in the gulf waters for this long. They were closest to the rig floor when the explosion and fire occurred, they are most likely ash by now.

Don't like throwing more wood on the fire,but having worked for an oil co in the past, some of them like to play the odds and skimp on safety. Unfortunately those aren't the ones in the line of fire so to speak. I wonder if the people responsible for contributing to this unfortunate incident will ever be held accountable!

I wonder if the people responsible for contributing to this unfortunate incident will ever be held accountable!

They will be held accountable just the same way as the people responsible for the backing crisis will be held accounatabe (E.G. They will get off scot free.)
Just seen the 'Rich List' in today Sunday Times, the top 1000 most wealthy people in Britain.
Over the last year their wealth has increased by (on average) 30%.
I hope that makes the rest of us feel a whole lot better in this recession.

Del

Given that it is BP involved, it is probably many of the same people. But I would submit that BP is already in bad odor with OSHA what with their refinery fires/explosions and all.

Now it would appear that the BOP has NOT closed and the riser which is folded and pinched has reduced, but not stopped the flow. About 4800 BBL/day is flowing from breaks in the riser.

Correction, that should be between 42,000 and 48,000 GALLONS/day not barrels (which would be between 1000 and 1150 bbls a day), chalk that up to being tired when I posted that. But considering there is no real way to measure that at the moment, I suspect someone pulled that number out of their arse. The well had not been flow tested yet.

Sir, my youngest son was killed in this accident. My hope, of course, is that he was killed instantaneously. He didn't deserve to die but he didn't deserve to suffer, either.

Any information, especially verifiable, would help me understand what cost my son his life. The software lockout on the blind-shear rams is of particular interest to me.

Please be so kind as to send an email to sparky2984@gmail.com. That's an email address I rarely use and once we make contact there I can give you my name and regular email address. I don't want to give my regular email address here because I might end up being contacted by either a bunch of lawyers or a bunch of BP people.

Thank you in advance for your kind assistance.

I was told this by someone who claimed to be a crewmember on another Transocean vessel under contract to BP in the GoM. I did not know this person and cannot verify what he said is or is not true. You would need to subpoena any all records concerning the operating procedures and specifications for the BOP and it's software.

Survivors of last week's massive oil rig explosion have told ABC News that alarms meant to warn them of an imminent blast never sounded, and oil industry experts now agree that a critical failsafe needed to prevent the blast and the subsequent spill didn't work. Deepwater Horizon rig workers say there was no alarm before the first blast. They were two crucial safeguards that failed during the chain reaction that left 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon dead and led to what some now believe could be the worst oil rig disaster in U.S. history. "It was chaos," survivor Dwayne Martinez told ABC News. "Nothing went as planned, like it was supposed to." Martinez and survivor Micah Sandell described the grotesque scene that followed the first concussion on the rig, when a huge plume of gas vapor belched from the well and encircled the Deepwater Horizon, and a second, larger burst, when that gas cloud ignited. "It was people screaming and hollerin," Sandell said. "I never seen nothing like that. Never." The first sign of trouble came when workers on the rig started to inject seawater into the well to replace a plug of mud that had been holding back the gas and oil. One of the valves on a massive safety device called a "blowout preventer" should have been closed, but was open, according to Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, who has been following developments out in the Gulf. That change in pressure would have launched the contents of the well pipe - first the seawater and mud, then the gas - up towards the surface. Related WATCH: Oil Reaches Shore of the Mississippi DeltaDid Oil Industry Ignore Safety Gear Problems?Deja Vu: Officials in Charge of Oil Spill Battered Before by Katrina Sign Up For Blotter Alerts! E-mail address: More Newsletters » "As the bubble made its way to us, it would get bigger and bigger and accelerate rapidly," Smith said. "First thing that would happen would be a water spout. It would have been raining salt water." Martinez and Sandell said water and mud rose 300 feet into the air. "I'm sure they tried to hit the switches," Smith said, referring to an emergency valve on the blowout preventer that clamps down on the pipe. "But it would have been too late." By then, any spark in contact with the cloud of gas would - and did - turn deadly. Officials from Transocean, the company that owns the rig and leases it to BP, told ABC News they would not speculate as to whether the alarms sounded, or if they did not, why. Tony Buzbee, the lawyer now representing the two oil rig workers in a lawsuit against BP and Transocean, said he hopes to get those answers. "It either tells you that the alarms failed or that somebody muted the alarm because alarms are so common out in the oil patch that sometimes as a matter of course, they mute alarms," he said.

and NPR is saying that Transocean required all the survivors to sign waivers from litigation the minute they hit the beach before they were even allowed to sleep or see their families.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126565283