A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [4]
The drilling fluid is the primary stopper for the whole well. If you’re going to remove that stopper, you’d better have something else to hold the pressure. Usually, that something else is several hundred feet of cement. On the night of the explosion, as rig workers were preparing to seal the well for later use, drillers were told to remove the drilling fluid and replace it with plain seawater—in essence, to pull out the stopper. The cement did not hold. And in the critical moment, the blowout preventer failed. The consequent gas blast was the blowout.
That’s what went wrong. But so many things had gone wrong before the blowout that assistant well driller Steve Curtis had nicknamed it “the well from hell.” Curtis, thirty-nine, a married father of two from Georgetown, Louisiana, was never found.
Right from the start—beginning with Hurricane Ida forcing the Marianas rig off the well location—various things didn’t proceed as planned, or struck people as risky.
The Deepwater Horizon, built at a cost of $350 million, was new in February 2001. In September 2009, it had drilled the deepest oil well in history—over 35,000 feet deep—in the Gulf of Mexico’s Tiber Field.
It was a world-class rig, but it was almost ten years old. The wonderful high-tech gadgets that were state of the art in 2001 did not always function as well in 2010. Equipment was getting dated. Old parts didn’t always work with new innovations. Manufacturers changed product lines. Sometimes they had to find a different company to make a part from scratch.
The world has changed a lot since the rig was built. So has software. More 3-D, a lot more graphics. Drillers sit in a small room and use computer screens to watch key indicators. Depth of the bit, pressure on the pipe, flows in, flows out. But on this job, the software repeatedly hit glitches. Computers froze. Data didn’t update. Sometimes workers got what they called the “blue screen of death.” In March and April 2010, audits by maritime risk managers Lloyd’s Register Group identified more than two dozen components and systems on the rig in “bad” or “poor” condition, and found some workers dismayed about safety practices and fearing reprisals if they reported mistakes.
Risk is part of life. And it’s part of drilling. Yet drilling culture has changed, with much greater emphasis on safety than in the past. Many people still working, however, came up the ranks in a risk-prone, cowboy “oil patch” culture. A friend of mine who worked the Gulf of Mexico oil field in the 1970s says, “It was clear to me that I was way underqualified for what I was doing. Safety didn’t get you promoted. They wanted speed. If we filled a supply boat with five thousand gallons of diesel fuel in twenty-five minutes, they’d rather you disconnect in a big hurry and spill fifty gallons across the deck than take an extra three minutes to do it safe and clean. I’d actually get yelled at for stuff like that. Another thing that was clear: if you could simply read or write, you could pretty much run the show. They actually gave oral exams to workers who couldn’t read. I was still a kid, but pretty soon I was put in charge of a supply boat because I could read and write. That was the culture then.” Another friend, now a tug captain, says, “Never in the four years I worked the rig did I hear anyone say, ‘Let’s wait for better sea conditions.’ We were always dragged into situations we didn’t want to be in, doing things I didn’t think were