Contractor: Activity on busy rig obscured key data ‘We were pretty close to blind’
oooh, bad news for BP, I believe, since BP was determining what work would happen, and when. They’ll have to explain why there was so much activity going on that people couldn’t make heads or tails out of the data.
And for those who wonder how there was data to review after the rig blew up: Companies have equipment and sensors that collect real-time data from the rig, which can be viewed by workers on the rig and managers on shore. So that data is preserved (or should be) up until the exact moment of the explosion.
METAIRIE (AP) — Workers had difficulty monitoring key data during a critical time in the final hour before the Gulf of Mexico rig explosion because so many activities were happening at once, a contractor said Friday.
Data presented by John Gisclair, a support services coordinator for a unit of Halliburton, to a federal panel investigating the April 20 disaster shows there was a sharp rise in pressure that was later followed by a sharp drop in pressure.
Gisclair said that could have been an indicator that something was wrong.
But Gisclair said one of his workers who was on the rig later told him that there were so many simultaneous activities — starting with the displacing of mud to the pumping of fluids overboard — it was difficult to see what was going on.
“We’re pretty close to blind,” at one point, Gisclair testified.