British Petroleum (BP) has been putting on ads saying that any worker on location has the right to stop any operation if they felt it was hazardous.
From my own experience working with BP even before this accident, it was already the case that anyone (with a reasonable reason) could stop the operation.
Like any disaster, there are usually multiple causes and the reasons are often complex.
Here is the summary of the accident report for additional reading.
http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/sustainability/issue-reports/Deepwater_Horizon_Accident_Investigation_Report_Executive_summary.pdf
My opinion is that the crew already had the right to stop any operation and they might have missed a few warning signs of the accident but it is probable that any of their actions could not prevented it and the real problem was with the upper management of BP skipping or modifying established procedures as well as not recognizing from the information they were receiving that there was a problem until it was too late.
A secondary aspect is that the rig crew was very tired as this drilling goes on 24/7 and missed some things that would be obvious if they were not as fatigued.
Of course hindsight is always 20/20
To me this is one of the unanswered questions. How the heck did it get as far as it did before the blowout occurred.
There were about four times the blowout could have been stopped. And there were people who should have seen the signs of the well unloading and shut it down who didn’t. They are all dead, so we can’t ask them why.
Really, right until the gas hit the drill deck, the well could have been shut down. It isn’t as if the guys on the deck didn’t know what they were doing, and were inexperienced. They knew they were engaged in a dangerous job, they knew what the dangers were, and they knew that surviving a blowout when standing on the deck was not a good prospect. You don’t take notice of an absentee manager’s policy when your life is on the line with your work. Upper management didn’t modify policies, and did not direct the well operations on an hour to hour basis.
The BP analysis isn’t the right one to read. You want the National Commission report.
The reasons for the blowout and the subsequent leak are not what people thought they were when the accident occurred. Curiously BP is largely left off the hook, although there were clear issues in the way safety and management of the rig was performed, they didn’t ultimately contribute to the disaster.
A common comment about the disaster was actually about how many times other rigs in the GOM had got all bar one step to a similar blowout, but had caught it. Like most really bad accidents, it is the swiss cheese model - you have to get all the holes to line up before bad things happen. On the Deepwater Horizon there were a lot of holes that had to line up, but they did.
Wells have a lot of safety capabilities, and much monitoring. A simple glance at any number of indicators could have told he guys on the drill deck they had only a few minutes to live unless they shut it down, but somehow they didn’t do it. Some monitoring was disabled. For instance because the mud was being unloaded directly to a barge and not held in tanks, the mud volume was not being monitored properly, but the barge filled up sooner than it should have - which alone should have caused mental alarms bells to ring. Why this was done, and why the mud logger was not watching is something we will never know. The mud logger was one of the guys who died.
Thanks for the report.
If one looks at page 125 of that report, it says that most of the decisions made by BP/Haliburton/Transocean that could have prevented the disaster were made to save time (and thus reduce expenses).
These were not decisions made by the rig crew but by others higher up in the decision making process.
Also, the mud logger did survive the explosion but he missed the pressure increase as he had stopped monitoring for a 8 - 10 minute break and missed this pressure increase (as well as other rig workers) when he returned from his break.
After reading through this report, it appears that the rig workers definitely could have prevented it but they were handicapped by decisions made previously as noted on page 125 of the report
Thanks
It is a mess the entire accident.
There were very bad decisions made that eventually had no impact on the disaster, but could have been the cause of very bad things in and of themselves in other circumstances, and things that nobody expected to be an issue that turned out to be important. I don’t think anyone thought the reason for the enormous extent of spilled oil, and the manner in which the rate of leaking got worse would eventually turn out to be a design flaw by Cameron. There were mistakes and poor decisions made by almost everyone involved. Right from an abrogation of responsibility by the MMS, through BP, Transocean, Haliburton. Nobody is blame free. But, as I noted above. Deepwater Horizon was not the first rig to come to near disaster- with only operation of the blow-out preventer stopping a similar accident. It was just that this rig was the one where the last hurdle fell as well. The lessons are industry wide.
BP’s safety culture was a curious problem. They made a big deal of it, and ensured that the letter of the policy was implemented. But it was about box ticking, and clearly designed by a bureaucrat. Like so many really bad and complex accidents (and the parallels to the two Space Shuttle losses are very clear) it is clear that complacency was the single biggest contributor. The slow degradation of safety standards that occurs when nothing bad has happened for a long time.
One thing that gets little attention is the nature of the operations between BP UK, and what was BP US. BP US used to be known as AMOCO. A lot of the BP people were actually AMOCO people. But the merger had some issues, and there were a lot of occasions where UK managers were put in place over AMOCO operations. Culture clashes and other friction did not help things. For a time the merged entity was know as BP-Amoco. The industry joke was “How do you pronounce BP-Amoco?”. Answer “BP”, “Amoco is silent.”