re: #5 Bagua

Repost about the 60 minute report:

Ooops

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.

“He 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, it’s no big deal.’ And I thought, ‘How can it be not a big deal? There’s chunks of our seal is now missing,’” Williams told Pelley.

And, Williams says, he knew about another problem with the blowout preventer.

The BOP is operated from the surface by wires connected to two control pods; one is a back-up. Williams says one pod lost some of its function weeks before.

So the subsequent pressure tests were unreliable, and the BP executive forced a rush to displace the mud with seawater without the third concrete plug based upon those tests.

We know what happened next, the seawater couldn’t hold down the undetected pressure and the initial plugs failed, the blowout Preventer then fails as it never worked in the first place, nor could it be activated.

Looks like Transwestern and BP are both culpable here, not so much Haliburton, if at all, and even Cameron is off the hook if this proves out.

Hey Bagua.

My husband, who is a mud engineer, tells me he sees pieces of rubber all the time; that these rubber pieces in the BOP are very thick, and reinforced, and the shearing of a few chunks of it isn’t a problem. Also, that they are designed so that pipe will move through them, so moving pipe through them was not in itself odd or unusual.

The REAL problem in this thing was in the 2nd part of the report, about the cement plugs. That second part of the report confirms the events that the Roi heard a week or so ago. The mud was the ONLY thing keeping pressure on the oil and gas and keeping it out of the riser (pipe). When they circulated the mud out before putting in the final plug - that sealed their fate.The blowout would not have occurred if they had taken the time to set that final plug before circulating the mud out, and the engineer in the 60 minutes report confirmed that.

The original plan was to do set that plug properly. It was BP who decided to do it differently to save a few days time (and money). It was BP who “won” that argument. This blowout is BP’s fault. They will continue to try to claim that it was Transocean’s fault or that the BOP was to blame. Not true. BP made the fatal decision when they circulated the mud out before putting in the final plug.