A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [130]
And that worries me. On my first trip to the Gulf after the explosion, I feared the worst case would be that the blowout would ruin the Gulf’s marshes and beaches and fisheries and wildlife for years to come. Now a new worst-case scenario arises: What if it doesn’t? What if, having looked catastrophe in the pupils, we decide the worst blowout ever is simply not so bad? What if we think that wherever, whenever the next one comes, we can just deal with it? What if we do, in fact, hit the snooze button? And nothing changes. Then this was all for nothing; it was just an unredeemed sacrifice, an unmitigated disaster.
The thing about having dodged a bullet is: if you just keep staring, you get shot.
Engineers are preparing to start the delicate remote-control work of detaching the temporary cap that first stopped the gushing oil, so they can raise the failed blowout preventer the mile from seafloor to surface. There’s concern that in the process, the crane may accidentally drop the 50-foot, 300-ton device onto the wellhead. So my question: What’s the rush? Why not wait for the relief well to securely seal the well bottom? Why the hurry to do this now? Didn’t we learn that hurrying wasn’t the right thing to do with this well?
Allen is holding his cards tight, but the relief well must be close, right?
After four months and another recent delay for bad weather, the relief well drill bit is now churning nearly 18,000 feet beneath the rig. The task is a bit like hitting a dartboard three miles away. Except the dartboard is under a mile of water and two and a half miles of rock, and it’s not a straight shot.
Drilling the final stretch is a slow, exacting process. The drillers dig about twenty-five feet at a time, then run electric current through the relief well. The current creates a magnetic field in the pipe of the blown-out well, allowing engineers to calculate distances and make fine adjustments.
To guide the relief well to its target, BP has picked John Wright, who, after four decades of work drilling forty relief wells around the world, can say, “We’ve never missed yet. I’ve got high confidence.”
Well, okay; that’s the kind of guy we want.
THE NEW LIGHT OF AUTUMN
On September 17, 2010, the long, long-awaited relief well—one of them, anyway—reaches and breaches the quiescent blown-out well.
“Five agonizing months,” as the Associated Press puts it. The next step: drive the long-awaited cement stake deep into its black heart, plugging it up for good.
BP’s website has this announcement:
Release date: 17 September 2010 HOUSTON—Relief well drilling from the Development Driller III (DD3) re-started at 7:15 A.M. on Wednesday, and operations completed drilling the final 45 feet of hole. This drilling activity culminated with the intercept of the MC252 annulus and subsequent confirmation at 4:30 P.M. CDT Thursday. Total measured depth on the DD3 for the annulus intercept point was 17,977 feet. Operations conducted bottoms up circulation, which returned the contents of the well’s annulus to the rig for evaluation. Testing of the drilling mud recovered from the well indicated that no hydrocarbons or cement were present at the intersect point. Therefore, no annulus kill is necessary, and the annulus cementing will proceed as planned. It is expected that the MC252 well will be completely sealed on Saturday. Once cementing operations are complete, the DD3 will begin standard plugging and abandonment procedures for the relief well.
Saturday, September 18. While the final cementing is under way out in the Gulf, Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen, the man the Washington Post called “perhaps the least-excitable person in American public life,” walks into a Washington, DC, coffee shop looking so casual and relaxed that—though I’ve seen him on television