“Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck.
“It was no better there.”
That is the opening line of the New York Times exposé on one of the biggest stories of 2010: the BP oil spill. It’s been eight months since the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon set off the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Eleven workers were killed, and over 200 million gallons of oil were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
Earlier this month, the federal government took the first legal action to come out of a series of probes, suing BP and eight other companies for cleanup costs and environmental devastation under the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act.
More lawsuits are expected as governmental investigations proceed. But some companies have been accused of obstructing fact-finding efforts to determine liability. On Wednesday, Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, said it won’t honor subpoenas issued by investigators with the U.S. Chemical Safety Board. The board has challenged Transocean’s monitoring of testing on the blowout preventer that failed during the explosion and then has accused the company of withholding key documents and barring access to witnesses. Transocean says the board doesn’t have proper jurisdiction.
the New York Times came out with a major investigation into how the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon occurred. Based on interviews with 21 crew members, testimony from 94 others, the investigation concludes every single one of the rig’s defenses failed. According to the piece, the defense mechanisms either didn’t work, were activated too late, or weren’t deployed at all.
David Barstow talking:
you have this oil rig, which we’ve all seen photographs of, this enormous structure 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, and it went down after the oil spill. And I think many people sort of assume that it was like an inevitable kind of casualty of the blowout itself. But in fact, this oil rig was kind of like the Titanic. I mean, it was this incredible apparatus, this marvel of engineering, and it had all of these systems, these safety systems—state of the art, many of them—that were all designed to prevent the very thing that happened from happening.
And not only that, what also was striking about this is that it had a crew that was trained, trained frequently, on how to respond to blowouts, how to respond to fires, how to get off the rig quickly. And it also had leaders on this rig who had decades of experience in drilling in deepwater environments, and they knew all about blowouts, kicks, well control problems. And yet, on this night, on April 20th, every one of those systems, every one of those rehearsals, drills, etc., it all failed, and failed miserably.
And it didn’t fail because people were wanted something bad to happen or were not trying to do the best that they could, but what we discovered was that there was a kind of paralysis that gripped this vast rig in critical places at critical times. And what it resulted in is it resulted in people not taking the steps, not deploying some of these safety systems, or trying to deploy them but deploying them too late, when the damage had already been done.
And the net effect of this paralysis is that for nine minutes, from when the blowout first hit the rig until these crippling explosions that basically left this a dead ship, those nine minutes, there was no alarm, general alarm, issued to the 126 people who were on this rig. So, for most of the people on the rig, the first time they really understood that there was a major crisis going on was when the explosions ripped through this oil rig, in many cases injuring people, in some cases quite, quite devastating injuries—burns, broken bones, that kind of thing.
this rig was like a kind of a Gulf Coast town that was well prepared for Category 1 hurricanes but never contemplated what they would do when they were hit with a hundred-year storm. And it was sort of—you could see this even in the training policies. They were given very big, thick guidelines from Transocean, the owner of this rig, on when they should deploy these various systems. But there was a kind of a contradiction in these policies. The policies would say, “You really need to act quickly. It’s crucial. The history of oil rig disasters is the history of small problems that don’t get addressed right away.” And yet, they would also say, “But there’s a really big danger if you overreact. And if you overreact, then it could cost us a lot of money, it could create other safety issues.” And you see moments along the way where that contradiction essentially froze key people at key times.
And the best example I can think of on this point is what happened on the bridge. You have the bridge of this rig. You have a captain. You have other officers. And several minutes into this crisis, all of a sudden the computer consoles started lighting up with gas alarms. And there are gas alarms that are—there are detectors all over this rig that are constantly sensing and detecting even the slightest trace of gas. And when they detect really high levels of gas, the alarms are colored magenta. And all of a sudden, on these computer consoles in the bridge, there were dozens of magenta lights lighting up. Well, the officers on this rig had trained on what you do when you see a magenta light or one alarm going off. And they had a whole sort of procedure set up. First you acknowledge the alarm. Then you silence the alarm. Then you call the captain. You call the other supervisors. You send somebody with a handheld detector to go check the area, confirm the alarm. Then you come back. And it contemplated a much smaller kind of crisis. But when they were confronted with dozens of alarms going off all at once, they didn’t know what to do. They hadn’t been trained for that moment. And they said, quite frankly, “We just didn’t know what to do.”
Likewise, they have another—right at the same console where they have these magenta lights going off, they have another system that allows them to shut down ventilation systems, shut down electrical systems to prevent a source of ignition. They even have a button that would shut down the main engines on the rig, which were the things that ultimately exploded so devastatingly on this rig. But this is a system that is incredibly complex. One of these systems takes 30 different buttons that you have to pick from in order to deploy it and deploy it under the crunch of time. If you can imagine, put yourself in the shoes of those people on that bridge. This system had initially been designed to be automatic. Transocean set some of these systems so that they basically required a human being to make the correct decision at the correct time, armed with the correct information. You kind of needed a triple-bang shot of all the right things to occur. And what happened again and again and again that night was that you didn’t have the right people with the right information with the right systems. And what happened was this kind of paralysis.
Transocean now argues that on a sophisticated rig operating in these conditions that it can actually be more dangerous if you have automated systems. They also argue that if you have alarm systems that trigger automatic evacuation sirens all the time, and those turn out to be false alarms, that it will be sort of the “cry wolf” syndrome, and people will stop listening and reacting in the same way.
the most controversial moment with the captain himself comes from an allegation that was made by the chief engineer on the rig, who said that during the evacuation process, that at one moment the captain suggested leaving behind a very badly wounded crew member. The captain has denied that through his lawyer. But what emerges in the interviews and in the testimony, especially about the captain, is a sense of a young man—he’s 34 years old, had been a captain for a couple of years—who seemed like what he was really trying to do was sort of say, “OK, everything is OK. Everything is—be calm. This isn’t as bad as it might look,” and was kind of consistently counseling against taking the kind of really decisive steps that, in retrospect, looking back, probably did need to be taken. So, for example, one of the really important safety systems is this ability to disconnect the rig from the well—in other words, cut it off from the source of the fire that is consuming this rig. And that’s triggered with something called the emergency disconnect system. And after the explosions, you had some of the crew members saying, “We need to hit this emergency disconnect.” It’s like hitting the eject button if you’re a fighter pilot.
And there was a reluctance on the part of the captain to take that step, even though, at that point, they had no power, they were burning, explosions going off all over the place. And so, that was, I think, a moment where you see this kind of “push me, pull you” of the Transocean safety policies coming into a moment where it leads someone like that into a kind of—some indecision.
this is really one of the remarkable aspects of this story. These are not like fly-by-night operators. These are not second-, third-tier operators. These are the A team. This is the first string of deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. And the fact that this rig, with this crew, could go down in this fashion, raises some really important questions about the other rigs that are going to be continuing to drill in very tough circumstances out in the Gulf of Mexico.
Obama has lifted the moratorium. And one of the critical safety devices in this whole mess is this thing called a blowout preventer. And this is the thing that rests on the seabed, and it is this five-story-tall, hundreds—you know, just a massive device that is supposed to be triggered from the rig itself to seal the well—is supposed to be triggered from the rig itself to seal the well in an emergency, in this case. Transocean has made a really remarkable argument lately. They have argued that this blowout preventer simply wasn’t capable of preventing this blowout. Well, that’s a remarkable thing, because the blowout preventer is the key safety device for all of these rigs out there in the Gulf of Mexico. And if they’re sitting on top of blowout preventers that are not, as the industry has long portrayed, the kind of ultimate fail-safe device, then this is something that I think would be a major issue for regulators at the Interior Department who are trying to think about how do we go forward with deepwater drilling in a way that doesn’t result in another one of these, you know, next year or the year after.
when you spend time down there and you understand the centrality of the oil-drilling industry to the entire economy along that part of the coastline, and you begin hearing and feeling the political pressure that builds. They’re all in agreement that we’ve got to get going again. When you see the kind of lifestyles that come with this industry—I mean, this is one of the remarkable things about this crew. this really, in a way, is one of the final really great blue-collar jobs left in America. This is a rig where someone with a high-school degree or a little bit of community college can go out and can make $150,000, $160,00, $170,000 a year, great benefits, great vacation.
we heard a lot early on about BP’s safety culture. And it’s true, they have a very troubling safety culture, and it’s been well documented in a number of different areas, such as Texas City and in Alaska and in California. But the truth of the matter is that this is actually a little more complicated, because the safety culture on Deepwater Horizon really wasn’t the BP safety culture. It was actually the Transocean safety culture. And that’s a very different thing from the BP safety culture. And I think it would be in some ways comforting if we could all think, well, this is really just a story about a company that cut corners on safety, and this is the end result. What makes it more complicated and troubling in some ways is that that wasn’t the case here. Transocean is a company with a very strong and potent safety culture. And that this could happen on this rig in that culture with these people should give us a lot more reason to think more deeply about what it means to do deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Discussion with David Barstow
David Barstow is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. He wrote the oil spill piece with David Rohde and Stephanie Saul. It’s called “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours.”
– from democracynow.org