Following is an excerpt from "Emptywheel"
Marcy, if you havenıt seen it already, you must see the exclusive 60 Minutes
interview with an eyewitness to the disaster. Here are a few excerpts:
..
But the trouble was just beginning: when drilling resumed, Williams says
there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He
says, four weeks before the explosion, the rigıs most vital piece of safety
equipment was damaged.
Williams says, during a test, they closed the gasket. But while it was shut
tight, a crewman on deck accidentally nudged a joystick, applying hundreds
of thousands of pounds of force, and moving 15 feet of drill pipe through
the closed blowout preventer. Later, a man monitoring drilling fluid rising
to the top made a troubling find.
³He discovered chunks of rubber in the drilling fluid. He thought it was
important enough to gather this double handful of chunks of rubber and bring
them into the driller shack. I recall asking the supervisor if this was out
of the ordinary. And he says, Oh, itıs no big deal.ı And I thought, how
can it be not a big deal? Thereıs chunks of our seal is now missing.²
..
Williamsı survival may be critical to the investigation. We took his story
to Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Last week, the White House asked Bea to help analyze the Deepwater Horizon
accident. Bea investigated the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster for NASA and
the Hurricane Katrina disaster for the National Science Foundation.
³So if the annular is damaged, if I understand you correctly, you canıt do
the pressure tests in a reliable way?² Pelley asked.
³Thatıs correct. You may get pressure test recordings, but because youıre
leaking pressure, they are not reliable,² Bea explained.
³The morning of the disaster, according to Williams, there was an argument
in front of all the men on the ship between the Transocean manager and the
BP manager. Do you know what that argument is about?² Pelley asked.
Bea replied, ³Yes,² telling Pelley the argument was about who was the boss.
In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton,
place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean
manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid
what drillers call ³mud² to keep the pressure down below contained. But
the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the ³mud² before the last plug was
set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs
were finished.
Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, ³It expedites the subsequent
steps.²
³Itıs a matter of going faster,² Pelley remarked.
³Faster, sure,² Bea replied.
Bea said BP had won that argument.
³If the mudı had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?²
Pelley asked.
³It doesnıt look like it,² Bea replied.
Jh
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