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.